The MEMBRA research project explores how trees respond to environmental stress and climate change. The project combined scientific research with arts and humanities to promote new cultural practices and to develop ways to ‘speak differently’ about the challenges facing UK and Global treescapes. Also, encouraging a shift in how humans relate to trees and forests scientifically, creatively, and via policy.
The project’s findings highlight the sophisticated adaptive mechanisms of trees, and directed researchers’ attention to the long-term storage of adaptive capacity (i.e. resilience) and the slow or long-delayed responses arising from this stored resilience.
This led to the development of the concept of the Remembering Forest, which seeks to identify the components of resilience ‘memory’ of forests, and advocates for a more holistic approach to forest management that recognises the ultimate inseparability of trees, their environment and we humans.