The Forestry Explained infographics and case studies have been influential in creating the website’s look-and-feel. They are a great way of presenting complex information in a distilled and accessible fashion, enabling us to proactively inform society about the sector and all the benefits and challenges associated with it. The effort we, and our contributors, put into case studies in particular, is more than justified by the number of monthly downloads they generate.

As the website evolves, we are constantly looking for ways of developing and improving the site, ensuring that its initial remit – to share all aspects of forestry in a positive and proactive way – is met and expectations are exceeded.

In recent weeks, we have placed our case studies under the spotlight to identify areas where we can improve them. While the PDF booklet format makes them fun to ‘flick through’ on the website, this formate creates challenges for search engines. The decision has thus been made to move toward a blog-style layout, which still provides us with design freedom to make the case visually attractive and enticing, but enables better search engine optimisation.

Over the next few months we will be slowly transferring existing case studies into this new format, with all new case studies uploaded as blogs.

There are a number of exciting case studies about to be published, including “The call of the thunder bird”, which examines how the forestry sector can help reverse the decline of the iconic South Ground Hornbill. We are also taking a fun look at the possible origins of Mpumalanga and Limpopo’s stone circles and how, as an industry we are determined to conserve them, independent of their origin for future generations to puzzle over.

If you have a forestry, conservation, water stewardship or outreach programme that you think would make a great case study, please get in touch.