Cambridge team maps 6 million trees in Scottish Cairngorms woodland recovery
A University of Cambridge-led team used airborne LiDAR surveys to create 3D maps of the Cairngorms National Park, revealing over 6 million individual trees across 569 km². The maps show that 2.65 million trees (40% of those surveyed) were under five metres tall, indicating natural regeneration largely near forest edges, with the study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Over 5,235 hectares of previously open land now supports young woodland (over 100 trees per hectare), largely established naturally through a landscape-scale deer management approach by the Cairngorms Connect partnership. The new LiDAR-based method validated through ground measurements and field surveys can track woodland expansion at landscape scale and potentially replace hundreds of hours of ground-based surveying.