Tiny Forest brings the benefits of woodland right into the heart of our cities and urban spaces: connecting people with nature, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as providing nature-rich habitat to support urban wildlife.

Earthwatch is pioneering Tiny Forest in the UK and is conducting a UK-wide research study to help us understand how these super tiny woods have the potential to be super powerful.

Last night Earthwatch Europe launched their Lottery funded partnership with GoodGym at the Littlemore Tiny Forest.

A couple of years ago 600 saplings were planted in a patch of ground 200 metres square (roughly the size of a tennis court), and the plot is now a lovely baby woodland at the end of a wild flower patch.

Earthwatch are collecting data on biodiversity, carbon storage, flood mitigation and thermal comfort in the Tiny Forest in order to see how the scheme could help in urban areas. 100 of the 600 trees in the Littlemore Tiny Forest have been tagged to be regularly monitored, and these were the main focus of our citizen science.

Dividing into trios we made our way around the site checking that the trees were correctly identified in the database, measuring height and girth, and counting the number of stems for multi-stem trees. It turned out to be a very satisfying task - particularly tracking down the last few elusive tagged trees! We managed to find and monitor 58 trees in under an hour.

Other experiments made observations on water soak away and thermal comfort. Tracking the changes over the next few years will be very interesting.

Welcome to GoodGym Mark and Jac. Great to have a visitor from the central team Theresa.

A fantastic turn out from the Goodgym team at this years Run Wytham Woods 10k.

It is a glorious course, very hilly and very beautiful. It was very muggy today but we all triumphed!

Gorgeous ceramic medals were the memento and we enjoyed a slice of cake afterwards in true Goodgym fashion.

Same again next year??

Well Raleigh partnership launch task dawned without any of the Raleigh goodies, but the sun shone and we did manage to get the discount code from Amy at Windsor and Maidenhead GoodGym, so we're chalking it up as a success anyway!

The task:
Makespace had asked us to do a thorough tidy of their canal-side garden and car park. We mowed (without breaking the lawnmower!), scraped, weeded, tidied, litter picked, chopped brambles, pruned weeping willow, and generally gave it a really thorough spruce-up.

Many hands make light work!

When one of the first things you find on a litter pick is a loo seat you know it's going to be an interesting one. Sure enough, we could have filled our sacks at least 10 times over with the amount of rubbish dumped along the sides of the Lye Valley SSSI. It's clearly a favourite dumping ground, with a whole loo, bike frames, football boots, an umbrella, electric blanket, CD player, paint tins, broken glass, oilcans, hub caps, and a steam cleaner all part of our haul. Of course, there were also the usual suspects of food and drink wrappers too. Usually litter picking is quite a satisfying task. It was great to see the area looking better after our work, but really very sad to see that such a special place is treated with so little respect.

Congratulations on reaching the 10 Good Deed milestone Axelle!