John Parker, CEO
February 2024 saw the end of another successful series of Wednesday Webinars, which broke all records and showcased the Arboricultural Association to a greater global audience than ever before.
For the first time we obtained sponsorship for a webinar series, which came courtesy of Stihl. We are grateful to Stihl for its support, and for helping us to continue to be able to offer these events free for everyone to enjoy. We are also delighted to have worked with the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) to ensure that all of our Wednesday Webinars qualify for continuous educational units (CEUs, also known as CPD) – making them even more attractive to ISA members around the world. And, of course, by watching the webinars you also qualify for Association CPD which contributes towards your annual membership requirements.
In this series we delivered 13 webinars covering a diverse range of topics – Ted Green’s Treetime, ash dieback, tree lore and legacy, climate resilience, woodlands at war, tree decay, ancient trees and planning, forests before humans, beating the greenwash, roots, decay detection, diseases of lime, street trees and canopy soils. We welcomed speakers from the UK, the United States, Norway and Sweden, and in total more than 8,100 people watched the webinars live, from an average of 48 countries per webinar. The highest audience was, fittingly, for Dr David Lonsdale, who spoke about ‘Tree decay – a few questions still worth asking’. 956 people watched this one, a record which will be hard for anyone to beat.
It absolutely is not all about numbers, but I know that some of you enjoy statistics. In that spirit, the league table for the top ten all-time most-attended webinars looks like this:
1. Tree decay – a few questions still worth asking. David Lonsdale, January 2024. 956 viewers
2. Trees in development. Sharon Durdant-Hollamby and Luke Fay, February 2023. 891 viewers
3. Trees and the law. Liz Nicholls and Charles Mynors, February 2023. 864 viewers
4. Ancient trees and planning. Jim Mullholland and Emma Gilmartin, January 2024. 854 viewers
5. Why do we lose so many trees? Russell Miller and Jim Chambers, February 2024. 832 viewers
6. Soil and trees. Emma Schaffert and Claire Harbinson, March 2021. 718 viewers
7. Forests before humans. Harry Studholme, January 2024. 694 viewers
8. Beating the greenwash. Jeremy Barrell, January 2024. 686 viewers
9. Topping and tree risk management. Jeremy Barrell, December 2020. 678 viewers
10. Tree selection for climate resilience. Henrik Sjöman and Arit Anderson, December 2023. 668 viewers
Sharing ideas globally
Since May 2020 the Association has provided 82 free Wednesday Webinars, watched by just under 30,000 people from all over the world. The sessions not only bring the biggest names in arboriculture to wide audiences which might not otherwise be able to access them, but – just as importantly – provide a platform for anyone to disseminate their ideas. It is a real-time, interactive experience which I do not believe exists anywhere else.
In addition to this, we are of course also building a comprehensive list of favourite books from our speakers. We have previously published one list of these and will be producing another in a forthcoming edition of ARB Magazine. This series we had some great selections: some classics and a couple from left field. They included Treetime by Ted Green (obviously), Urban Forests by Jill Jones, Remarkable Trees of the World by Thomas Pakenham, A Forest Journey by John Perlin and The Value of a Whale by Adrienne Buller, to name but a few. And almost all of our speakers manage to restrict themselves to just one book, although one of our guests managed to sneak in four (thanks, Jeremy).
As ever, we had a couple of hiccups which have already taken their place in the folklore of Wednesday Webinars alongside the time that Ted answered the phone half way through his one-man show. My personal favourites this year were when Jim Mullholland had to leave early because his chippy tea was going to go cold, and Harry Studholme’s internet let him down and left me to fill half an hour with an impromptu Q&A session. You can catch up on anything you missed via the website, although some of the most embarrassing parts might have been edited out – which is why you should always try to watch them live.
The Wednesday Webinars are one of my favourite parts of my job, and every week it is an absolute privilege to share a couple of hours with our amazing audience, usually from six continents at once, and some of whom join us at ridiculous times of the night. Thank you all so much for being part of it, and I look forward to seeing you all at the next series – hopefully starting in November 2024.
This article was taken from Issue 205 Summer 2024 of the ARB Magazine, which is available to view free to members by simply logging in to the website and viewing your profile area.