A new international research project is to research, collect, and document forest cultural heritage across the Nordic region. Responding to the NordForsk call ‘Sustainable Futures of Forests’, it will redefine what cultural heritage means in a changing forest landscape. The project runs from April 2026 to December 2029.
Dr Charlotte Wrigley has been awarded funding from NordForsk for the international project Recognising Other Ontologies of TreeScapes: a roadmap for sustainable heritage futures (ROOTS) which foregrounds forest cultural heritage as an integral part of sustainable forest futures in the Nordic region.
Forests have shaped the Nordic region ecologically, economically, and culturally. Environmental pressures such as climate change are now threatening their existence, with rising temperatures and decreasing biodiversity requiring new strategies to safeguard forests. However, ROOTS points out that cultural heritage can often be overlooked, missed, or is less quantifiable than other forms of forest value. The project seeks to address that.
The acronym ROOTS points to the largely hidden but incredibly important root system that maintains the life of the forest, explains project leader Charlotte Wrigley, researcher at the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities at UiS, who is also leading the project ‘Good Fire: An Environmental History of Prescribed Burning in Norway and the North’. “Forest cultural heritage can be similarly hidden but no less important than the ecological and economic benefits forests provide. Our aim with ROOTS is to understand cultural heritage as an inextricable part of a forest ecosystem.”
The question of sustainability is key for addressing forest futures, yet ROOTS also argues heritage management needs a better language for addressing sustainability in forest cultural preservation at a time of environmental change. The project will therefore work across disciplines, as well as with cultural institutions and the general public, to develop a new approach to preserving forest cultural heritage that recognises it as a dynamic process that shifts in relation to the forest. The ROOTS team will hold a series of field workshops where all members will be in attendance, along with other community stakeholders; these workshops will set the research agenda and allow the team to develop fieldwork methods for documenting forest cultural heritage.
As part of NordForsk’s ‘Sustainable Futures of Forests’ call, ROOTS is one of eight research projects that have been selected for the maximum funding of 11 million krone. Each project leader is an early career researcher, and the requirement of at least four partner institutions across the Nordic and Baltic region will promote added value and knowledge sharing. In ROOTS, the University of Stavanger collaborates with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Aarhus University in Denmark, and the University of Turku in Finland. Each partner runs a work package that corresponds to a case study in their respective country and covers a cross-section of forest life across the Nordics: Sami tree marking in Swedish Sápmi, rewilding in Denmark’s oldest forest, Finnish forest folklore against the backdrop of the Nordic green transition, and the more-than-human heritage of a Norwegian rye grain. The culmination of ROOTS will produce a ‘living forest atlas’ that combines all case studies, and will exist as a resource far beyond the lifespan of the project.
Addressing sustainability challenges requires integrating the social and cultural aspects along with its economic and ecological ones
The Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities at UiS, which recently launched a new master’s course in public environmental humanities, is the ideal host for the project. Dolly Jørgensen, co-director of the Greenhouse, is excited to be adding ROOTS to the Centre’s strong environmental humanities project portfolio. At its core, the mission of ROOTS is to demonstrate how humanities research can highlight the importance of cultural heritage to our societies, and equip public institutions with the tools to respond to a rapidly changing world: “Addressing sustainability challenges requires integrating the social and cultural aspects along with its economic and ecological ones,” Jørgensen says. “ROOTS is perfectly positioned as an environmental humanities project to do that for forest management.”