Tweed Forum has been delivering native riparian (river) woodland creation throughout the Tweed catchment for over two decades, planting close to 1.6 million trees across more than 1,200 hectares and 90 landholdings
The aim of Tweed Forum’s native riparian (river) woodland creation programme is to plant the right trees in the right place, at the right scale; and to create a network of thriving native riparian woodland and healthy river systems throughout the Tweed catchment. Native woodlands in our uplands and along our rivers play a vital role in mitigating the climate crisis (cooling water via shading), attenuating flooding (slowing the flow and increasing storage); improving water quality (through filtration); conserving soil (reducing erosion); sequestering carbon; and enhancing our landscapes for amenity, recreation and tourism purposes. Key species, such as the iconic Atlantic salmon, and the freshwater habitats they rely on, are also supported and protected by healthy, biodiverse riverbank woodlands.
Creating more riparian woodland is crucial to building resilience for the future, but it needs to be targeted and at a scale which will have significant impact and increase connectivity across the Tweed catchment. Tweed Forum’s award-winning native riparian woodland programme is made possible by working with partners such as the Woodland Trust, Northumberland County Council and the Scottish Wildlife Trust and is often delivered by Tweed Forum within a larger project or initiative such as the Riverwoods Blueprint Project, Great Northumberland Forest, LIFE WADER and Destination Tweed. You can see a map illustrating all of the woodland creation we have facilitated at the bottom of this page.
In addition to project funding, riparian woodland creation can be funded using other sources such as the Forestry Grant Scheme (Scotland) or the England Woodland Creation Offer. Carbon finance, via the Woodland Carbon Code, has increasingly played a part in the funding of native river woodland creation, alongside providing landowners with an alternative source of long-term income from their land. Tweed Forum are also at the forefront of employing novel sources of private finance to facilitate native woodland creation and nature restoration.
If you’re interested in creating riparian woodlands you can get in touch on info@tweedforum.org or take a look at our Practitioners’ Guide to Riparian Woodland Creation. The Guide supports farmers, landowners, land managers, conservation bodies and other organisations to create riparian woodland at the scale required to make a significant difference. Commissioned and funded by The Fishmongers’ Company’s Fisheries Charitable Trust, it shares over two decades of Tweed Forum’s experience in tree planting and catchment management at the landscape scale.
The interactive map below illustrates the woodland creation we have faciliated in more than two decades delivering strategic benefits across the 5000 km2 Tweed catchment. We hope you enjoy exploring the data – please note you can zoom in and click on an individual entry for more detail (and we also have some short notes underneath the map to explain the symbols we’ve used).
– the green polygons/shapes represent discrete blocks of tree planting; and the blue shading (buffer) surrounding the green polygons helps these shapes stand out/be visible when the map is zoomed out, i.e., the blue shading does not represent an area of tree planting
– the individual tree icons represent very small tree planting areas or where planting is more dispersed and therefore displaying a polygon or shape would be misrepresentative
