Over 100 people attended the Institute of Chartered Foresters Wales Centenary Conference Forestry at 100: A Century of Growth, A Future of Possibility, which was held in Reichal Hall, Bangor University. 

Attendees included senior figures from the Institute, as well as senior staff from Welsh Government, Natural Resources Wales and the private sector.

The highlight of the event was the session featuring a panel of final year Bangor BSc forestry students, who were Llanw Dawson-Stanley, Dan Gittins, Holly Bramley and Penny Newton. 

The session, titled Future Forests, Future Voices: Student Insights on Wales’s  Woodland Future, was chaired by Lecturer in Forestry, Dr Ashley Hardaker with Lecturer in Woodland Management Dr Tim Peters.

Professor John Healey, from the School of Environmental & Natural Sciences said, “I would like to thank all who contributed to make the conference such an enormous success. This was an opportunity for academics and policymakers to discuss the big challenges confronting forestry, which have huge implications for the environment and for society. I’m especially proud of our students who were incredibly impressive in their panel session. They were clearly very well prepared, and they did a fantastic job of a tackling a series of challenging questions about the future of forestry. We received a considerable amount of positive feedback on the session. It’s clear we’ve got a great deal of talent graduating from Bangor University and I look forward to seeing what our students accomplish in future.”

Bangor University was the first in the UK to teach degrees in forestry – in 1904.  It was recently ranked in first place amongst all universities in the Agriculture and Forestry subject league table of the Times and Sunday Times UK University Rankings for 2026.