Welcome to this July 2023 edition of the IALE UK newsletter. We continue with our new regular 'day in the life of a landscape ecologist' feature, this time starring Petra Guy from forest research. If you might be interested in being featured in a future 'day in the life' please get in touch via newsletter@iale.uk. In what looks an increasingly unstable and dangerous time for the world it's good to be reminded of the value of face-to-face contact, especially for fostering international cooperation in science and research to address shared problems. Cristina Rueda Uribe shares her thoughts on the IALE World Congress as an attendee from a UK institution, and we hope to have more reflections from other UK based attendees in the September issue of the newsletter. Postgrad / early career rep Caitlin Lewis has also been travelling, reporting here on a scientific trip to Belgium. For a bit of ambling closer to home - perhaps even from the comfort of your armchair - see this piece from Adrian Southern at the Woodland Trust, in which we hear about his colleague Pete Leeson's new Tree Amble Podcast and some of the landscape scale work being done by the Woodland Trust's team in Cumbria. Finally we have a short update from the IALE UK landscape connections webinar series, which will return with the annual Bunce lecture and IALE UK AGM in the autumn. Hopefully we'll see you there.