InTREEgue Network

Co-lead: Alison Dyke (SEI York)                                                              Co-lead: Joanne Morris (SEI York)                                                      Co-lead: Julia Touza (Environment and Geography)     

Join the Network

Disciplines coming together around trees to build a better future

The InTREEgue Network is a collaborative initiative based at the University of York, bringing together researchers and practitioners from across the university with a common interest in how trees enhance our world. Our mission is to stimulate discussion, foster learning, and build new areas for collaboration around how trees feature in our work. We use trees as the starting point for exploring how we can bring our diverse range of methods and approaches from arts and humanities, social sciences and natural sciences together to explore the entanglement of human and non-human interactions with trees, looking beyond our specific work focus to tackle cross-sectoral issues.  

Why InTREEgue matters

The UK has one of the lowest percentages of forest cover in Europe. Increasing this cover is a priority for many reasons, not least to realise the Government's ambition of achieving net zero by 2050, which is likely to remain a dominant theme in future funding calls. Trees and the biodiversity and nature embodied in treescapes are valued for their ecosystem services , health and wellbeing benefits and economic and socio-cultural importance as well as in their own right, and feature in many areas such as (urban) design and planning, literature, education, environmental management and conservation, construction, pharmaceuticals and more. However, stakeholders are faced with competing demands on the land beneath the trees while operating under increasing resource constraints. The University is in a good position to inform decision-making in this area, but there are opportunities for creatively combining expertise across departments that have not yet been explored.

Why Now?

The 5-year Future of UK Treescapes programme, which has successfully demonstrated the value of working creatively together across AHRC, ESRC and NERC disciplines towards more resilient and more treed landscapes, is drawing to a close. The InTREEgue nework will maintain and extend the cross-disciplinary connections formed in the five Treescapes projects that the University of York has been involved with and expand the geographical scope of the long-established Tropical Ecosystems Network. It is timely to build cross-department linkages, as there is growing enthusiasm in funding bodies working together to support interdisciplinary projects and programmes. 

Our collaborative efforts

The network is led by a core group representing a variety of disciplines, including social sciences (Stockholm Environment Institute York), arts and humanities (Archaeology, Department of English and Related Literature, and School of Arts and Creative Technologies), and natural sciences (Department of Environment & Geography, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, and Biology). Our initial seminar attracted enthusiastic participants from a wider range of fields, including Education, Health Sciences, Politics, and Chemistry.

Building on this energy, we’ve developed an exciting programme of events for the year ahead. These will create space for inspiring conversations, literary reading sessions, speed talks, guest speakers, and active sessions like nature walks among the trees. Together, we’ll explore how our diverse perspectives can help re-integrate trees and treescapes into our landscape and reconnect society more deeply with nature.

We invite you to join us in this journey!