Trees for Life

Trees for Life is rewilding the Scottish Highlands. With your support, we can restore the globally unique Caledonian Forest that once covered much of Scotland, creating space for wildlife to flourish and communities to thrive.  

We work with hundreds of volunteers and like-minded partners each year to restore, regenerate and expand native woodlands. Communities lie at the heart of our approach. People are part of nature, and crucial to its recovery.

Here’s an overview of our current projects: 

Red Squirrel Reintroduction. We're creating new populations of the red squirrel across the north of Scotland, carefully capturing reds from their strongholds and transporting them to new forests.

Caledonian Pinewood Recovery is a large-scale project to save Scotland's ancient pinewood remnants by encouraging their active management. We are working with landowners and managers to ensure that these precious forests, and all the wildlife that depend on them, have the best chance of survival. 

Affric Highlands is a collaborative project to scale up rewilding across a large area of the central Highlands. If we can better connect nature to communities and livelihoods, all three can flourish and support one another.    

Skills for Rewilding is providing 15 people with high-quality, fully-funded training in rewilding. Trainees will gain the practical skills and experience to support future careers in conservation. 

Lynx to Scotland is a collaborative project by the Vincent Wildlife Trust, SCOTLAND: The Big Picture and Trees for Life to begin a respectful, open conversation about lynx, and to explore the social feasibility of their reintroduction to Scotland.

Dundreggan Estate is our flagship example of rewilding in action. It's home to our tree nursery, where we grow native species from seed - many of them rare and hard to find. These saplings are then carefully planted across the estate and beyond to create forests of the future.

Planting trees. We have planted nearly two million trees and our work will continue until we have planted many millions more. 

We hope you've enjoyed learning more about the work of Trees for Life. 

We have made great progress in returning bleak landscapes of overgrazed grass back to wildlife-rich wild forest. But there is still much more to do. Generous support by donors is vital to help save the wild Caledonian Forest and all the wildlife that depends on it.