Britain’s plan to plant 180,000 hectares of new woodland by 2042 risks creating vast, disease-prone forests unless trees are designed from the start to suppress epidemics. Tree diseases are spreading faster due to global trade, pesticide resistance, and climate change. Current responses—monitoring, chemical sprays, and felling—are reactive, expensive, and often fail to stop outbreaks. Fusion Forest tackles this by designing plantations that use trees’ natural immunity and the forest’s physical structure to block pathogens. The team will build a new modelling framework, ForestFlow, that combines forest growth models with fluid dynamics to predict how diseases move through canopies and how species mixtures can prime trees’ defences. If successful, the project could shift forestry from crisis management to proactive prevention. Landowners and policymakers would get tools to design woodlands that slow or stop pathogen spread without heavy chemical use or tree removal. This matters for timber supply, biodiversity, and carbon storage—all quietly underpinned by healthy forests. The research is applied, with direct guidance for planting schemes, not fundamental science.
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Fusion Forest is a radically novel and interdisciplinary approach to design our future treescapes. We face a challenging scenario, where tree cover needs to be increased - the UK government has set out a 25-year programme to plant 180,000 hectares of trees by 2042 and to increase the woodland cover to 12% by 2060 - whilst there is an alarming increase in tree epidemics. These outbreaks, favoured by increased disease portability, chemical resistances and climate change, compromise the future of our woodlands, producing a dramatic loss of biodiversity and resources. We propose a proactive strategy where new plantations are designed from the onset to halt and suppress diseases using their natural immunity. Fusion Forest achieves so by cutting through discipline boundaries and establishing synergies among the latest discoveries and techniques in tree immunity, ecological modelling and fluids modelling. Fusion Forest seeks to understand how to stimulate priming of defence in trees by using careful combinations of species and lowering the disease pressure. In parallel, the project incorporates the often overlooked spatial component of forest canopies and uses forest heterogeneity to our advantage, creating physical barriers that complement and enhance the ecological ones. To do so, we design a new interdisciplinary modelling framework - named ForestFlow - that brings together forest growth models and computational fluid dynamics. The understanding gained from the ecophysical model, complemented by field and laboratory measurements, allows for a change of paradigm in the way we confront tree epidemics. The response to tree disease outbreaks is mostly reactive, focused on monitoring, chemical treatments and tree felling, with the subsequent environmental and economic costs. Working alongside our partners (landowners, woodland managers, technological companies and policy makers), Fusion Forest will provide the means to prepare forests for outbreaks ahead of their occurrence, reducing critically mitigation costs. Forecasting pathways of transmission opens the door to new strategies to halt the spread of pathogens, that will no longer be assumed to be inevitable. Combining physical and biological barriers for pathogens in our forests is a ground-breaking idea, and Fusion Forest will generate tools and specific guidance to ensure this synergy.
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