To plant or not to plant? Drivers of native woodland creation in the United Kingdom

Ecosystem restoration, particularly forest restoration, has become a global priority given its potential benefits (carbon storage, biodiversity, etc.), but its successful delivery depends on people, especially landholders. Nevertheless, our theory-based understanding of what drives landholders to create woodland types important for ecosystem restoration—such as mixed native woodlands, which offer the highest environmental benefits—remains limited. This thesis builds on Diffusion of Innovations Theory (DOIT) exploring what drives landholders to create diverse native forests in and around the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland through three analyses. The first explores how woodland creation intervention, landholder, and context characteristics influence landholders’ decisions to create mixed native woodland. The second examines how the most important woodland creation intervention attributes according to DOIT affect decisions to create mixed native woodland, accounting for causal links between DOIT attributes to minimise estimate bias. The third is a choice experiment exploring landholders’ preferences for attributes of a native woodland managed for biodiversity creation scheme. This thesis’ overarching findings suggest that landholders’ sustainable land use goals, together with their views of ecosystem restoration’s environmental benefits and compatibility with their land uses, precede deeper considerations of restoration adoption, where practical details (e.g. payment timings, profitability) gain prevalence. This indicates that the scalability and success of ecosystem restoration initiatives requires providing landholders with: (i) clear, evidence-based information on the environmental, practical, and economic aspects of restoration, helping them assess its compatibility with their land use goals and practices; (ii) adequate financial support; and (iii) restoration schemes that keep financial and non-financial aspects as simple and flexible as safeguards allow, making them easier to understand, use, and tailor. Overall, this thesis shows that to achieve ecosystem restoration and its multiple benefits at scale, programme designs should be more holistic, iterative, and sensitive to landholders’ perspectives, while incorporating safeguards against negative outcomes.