Forestry in British higher education: a tale of decline and regeneration

As outlined by Burley et al. (2009), academic forestry is not a discipline in its own right like botany or zoology but multidisciplinary, akin to engineering and medicine. Even if it is narrowed to the biology of woody perennials and the art of managing them, it still embraces many other elements of natural sciences, as well as some economic, social and environmental sciences, engineering, policy, management and business studies. Forestry education must therefore introduce scholars to this wide range of disciplines and this can present a number of interesting resourcing challenges for educational institutions, particularly when relatively few students choose to study forestry.