Meet the people behind our work: Fingle Woods

My name is David Rickwood and I've worked for the Woodland Trust for nearly nine years now. It's an extraordinary privilege really to be involved with Fingle. It's a very, very large and well-known site on the northern edge of Dartmoor.

These valleys on Dartmoor are often referred to as refugia because they are likely to be the sorts of places where some important lower plant assemblages and a number of other quite important species are likely to actually be able to be sustained in a warming climate.

We're now facing a whole host of threats from things like climate change, species decline, tree disease, and these are all factors that are occurring at a landscape scale.

The vision for Fingle Woods is to create a more resilient woodland that can face the very many challenges that are coming down the line. It's going to look much different to what it looks today. The woodland will be much more mixed. It will have a range of habitat types across it from woodland to open ground to areas of wet mire to the river edges.

My challenge is, day to day I'm dealing with infrastructure, dealing with processing, and felling timber on very, very steep, inaccessible slopes. We want to encourage other woodland owners to be fairly active in their management of their woodlands and we can do that by showing them the potential of what they can do with the wood that they remove and they fell from their sites.

You only need to come here once I think to realise actually how amazing the landscape is. It's an extraordinary opportunity really and one I'm very grateful for.