TreeTrader- an e-community woodland.

by Donald McPhillimy

TreeTrader is exactly the right concept for the times. It is creating a community of interest primarily amongst the small native tree nurseries, making a virtue of their localness. Every business has to be local to somewhere but a widely dispersed community of businesses can be local to many places. This is continuing the work we started with the Reforesting Scotland native woodland database, giving it added urgency and immediacy through the electronic medium.

In addition, TreeTrader is linking the core group to bigger nurseries, suppliers, advisors and other organisations. Peter and Jane are the spiders in the middle of the web, tweaking it, watching it, repairing it, making new links, gobbling up the unwary.

In a sense TreeTrader is another community woodland, another Rural Development Forest. The community is dispersed throughout Scotland and the age range of the forest is rather unusual, from minus one to minus three. Also the trees are planted rather closer together than in other community woodlands. There is no doubt, however, that the community plays a meaningful role in decisions about the trees and derives real benefits from the woodland. In fact, in terms of economic benefit, TreeTrader is incredibly efficient, at least in income per hectare. It is a little node of vibrant economic activity.

There are many community woodlands which could link to this node and derive some real economic benefits. Many could set up their own small scale tree nurseries and raise the stock they will need for their planting programmes. Some already are. They will need training and supplies which TreeTrader can provide. Others could collect seed and sell it on. Some community woodland groups have become skilled in certain areas of woodland management or event organisation and could sell these services to others, or swap services and products, through the TreeTrader marketplace. Then there is the whole area of product development although TreeTrader may not wish to divert too far from its core interest of growing young trees to be planted out in the forest.

Through e-commerce, TreeTrader is able to shift the perspective from a far flung hotch potch of often underfunded tree nurseries to a cohesive community at the centre of an exciting developing world which needs their products to plant and enrich community woodlands, Rural Development Forests, farm woodlands, native woodlands, sub-montane scrub and amenity woodlands as well as increasing the biodiversity value of boring old plantations and linking woodlands through Forest Habitat Networks in a sustainable fashion, according to Landscape Ecology principles. I claim the record for the most buzzwords in one sentence and wish TreeTrader great success.

Donald McPhillimy
Bankhead Farm, Dalmeny EH 30 9TF
Tuesday, 29 August 2000