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Europe’s first research station for the study of Atlantic temperate rainforest is set to be built beside an ancient wood in Cornwall.
The Thousand Year Trust charity is crowdfunding an initial amount to build the £750,000 facility, which will enable students and academics to study this historically overlooked but biodiverse natural habitat.
The research station, which has planning permission, will be built at Cabilla, a former Cornish hill farm on Bodmin Moor that has become a retreat centre and rainforest restoration project with a swath of ancient woodland at its heart.
“The reason why everyone whether they are eight or 80 knows and loves tropical rainforest and understands that they are the lungs of the planet is because they’ve been so comprehensively researched but there’s a lack of love and knowledge about temperate rainforests,” said Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, the founder of the Thousand Year Trust.
“A lot of that lack of knowledge is because there aren’t scientists spending time dedicated to Atlantic temperate rainforests.”
Atlantic temperate rainforest thrives in the mild, wet, oceanic climate of far western Europe, stretching from Bergen in Norway to Braga in northern Portugal. It is often oak woodland notable for its spectacular epiphytes such as moisture-loving lichens, mosses and ferns.
Swaths of the woodland, which is a valuable carbon sink, once covered western Scotland, Wales and south-west England, as well as Ireland, but it has been reduced to tiny fragments, a fraction of its former size. Globally, temperate rainforest covers less than 1% of the Earth’s land surface, making it one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet.
Awareness of the Atlantic rainforest was raised by Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforests of Britain. In 2023, the government published a temperate rainforests strategy for England, including a commitment to invest £750,000 on research into protecting England’s rainforests. Those funds are yet to be allocated.
Shrubsole has called for a target of doubling the area of British rainforest by 2050.
Hanbury-Tenison, who manages Cabilla, hosted 20 MSc students last year, with a further six PhDs being partly based in its Cornish rainforest from six universities that the Thousand Year Trust has partnered with. He hopes to double that number this year but lacks the facilities to host further scientific endeavours – until the research station is built.
It will be constructed from local wood sourced by the Woodland Trust and comprise bunkhouse accommodation for students, senior academics and volunteers, a laboratory/work station, canteen facilities and a modest amphitheatre area where talks and informal meetings can take place.
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According to Hanbury-Tenison, Cabilla is the ideal location for Europe’s first temperate rainforest research station because it is situated in the middle of the habitat’s climatic envelope, with Bodmin Moor approximately halfway between Bergen in the north and Braga to the south.
As well as its crowdfunder, the Thousand Year Trust is in discussions with other larger charities, philanthropists and the government about potential funding for the research station.
The charity is also receiving a helping hand from Hanbury-Tenison’s father, Robin, an explorer who founded Survival International. Robin is celebrating his 89th birthday next month by doing a sponsored row 25 miles along the River Tamar, the boundary between “Cornwall and England” – as the Cornish often put it – to raise money for the research station.
“We hope it will serve as a nexus for temperate rainforest research across the whole range,” said Merlin Hanbury-Tenison. “I truly believe that we’ll only be able to make headway in protecting and expanding the Atlantic temperate rainforest when we love it and we’ll only love it when we understand it and that comes from scientific research.
“In 10 years’ time, when my children are beginning their GCSE studies, I’d like for the British public and education system to know that we are a rainforest people living on a rainforest island, just as people in Brazil or Borneo are proud of their rainforests.”
