A paper on birds in small woods was presented at the 1992 inaugural IALE(UK) meeting. We will follow the development of that work over the past 25 years which has included many contributions to IALE(UK) conferences.
The focus of the initial paper was on patterns of species occurrence and community structure for woodland birds in a landscape of highly fragmented woodland. We will show how this developed to look at the processes involved in producing the observed patterns including variation in dispersal, breeding success and habitat quality between large woods and small woods concentrating on a few hole nesting species. The project also spans a period of technological development and incorporated the increasing use of GIS and remote sensing to characterise landscapes and habitat at different scales. Finally we show how these ideas from landscape ecology are being used in the conservation of woodland birds in the UK.