Forest management for estates, investment woodlands and utility land.
Full management of estates and investment woodlands: planning, operations, licences, compliance and reporting you can rely on. FMI manages over 1,000 ha for a utility and for investment-fund owners, and works to the same standard for any semi-state company, public body or private estate.
The whole programme, from objectives to reconciliation.
Most of these are in hand now on one utility estate; the rest are running for energy developers and funds.
A written plan
A management plan with objectives ordered by constraint, prescriptions, indicators and a review date; an annual operating programme; annual reporting of revenue and the programme it funded.
Inventory and measurement
Permanent plots, pre-sale measurement and thinning control to the same procedures each time — calliper, vertex and digital field capture — so marking and reconciliation rest on repeatable numbers.
Licensing and compliance
Felling and forest-road licences, Appropriate Assessment, Natura 2000 and water-catchment conditions, the closed season — every licence and consent tracked against the operation it covers. Grant and licence applications prepared in the owner’s name.
Timber sales management
We design the sale, invite tenders, assess the method statements, supervise the crew fortnightly and reconcile every load against weighbridge dockets. We neither buy timber nor harvest it; the award is yours.
Marking and silviculture
Every stem removed individually selected and paint-marked where the system calls for it, residual basal area recorded before felling begins, and each departure from the prescription recorded with its reason and its volume consequence.
Biodiversity monitoring and habitat mapping
A permanent plot network remeasured on a fixed cycle, Fossitt Level 3 habitat mapping at estate scale, deadwood and veteran-tree retention written into the prescriptions.
The next crop
Enrichment planting and protection of natural regeneration, each tree and shelter recorded by GPS so it can be found again, assessed for survival and reported on.
Drone survey and mapping
Orthophotography, LiDAR and multispectral survey flown and processed in-house — for planning, road design, change documentation and public communication.
Roads and infrastructure
Forest road planning and licensing, haul-route planning from terrain models, and the engineering inputs an owner’s own team needs.
Landowner and public liaison
Neighbouring landowners and access, public-facing constraints programmed and recorded, and presenting the forest to visitors — from award judges to the EU Nature Directors.
Your plan, your standards, your systems.
We work to the client’s own protocols where they exist and write them down where they do not. Commercial decisions stay with the owner; we prepare the silvicultural content, assess the method statements and report what happened.
- A named forester for every contract, based in the region, with the MD a phone call away
- Fortnightly supervision during operations, weekly reporting, a close-off report for every sale
- Method statements, RAMS, insurance certificates and safety statement available on request
- Data in the formats your GIS and CAD expect — ITM with Malin Head heights, GeoTIFF, shapefile, DWG — and maps as A2 PDFs
- Public-facing routes programmed for periods of lower use, with the constraint recorded and referred in advance
- Grant and licence applications prepared in the owner’s name
Permanent-plot measurement
Inventory to the same procedures, each timeManagement you can look at.
A utility’s forest estate, moved to continuous cover
A 640 ha lakeside estate, 418 ha of it forest, around a drinking-water reservoir: plan, inventory, licences, timber sales by scored tender, 82 permanent plots, 590 protected native saplings — and the EU Nature Directors in the stand.
Read the case study
Protecting the next crop: 590 native saplings, each one a point in the GIS
At the owner’s direction, FMI’s crews found 590 naturally regenerating native saplings across three sites — ten species, three in four of them oak — and protected each one with a shelter and stake, every stem GPS-recorded so it can be found again and checked.
Read more
Productivity mapping for an investment property
Leaf chlorophyll index on a hex grid, tree-health classification and stocking from a LiDAR and multispectral survey of 121 ha owned by an investment fund — the LiDAR inventory benchmarked against ground plots in 15 subcompartments.
On the projects pageBefore you pick up the phone.
Do you buy timber or run harvesting crews?
No. FMI neither buys timber nor harvests it. We design the sale, assess the contractors’ method statements, supervise the operation and reconcile every load against the weighbridge dockets — and the award is yours. That independence is the point of having a manager.
What does a management plan from FMI contain?
Objectives ordered by constraint, prescriptions for each stand, indicators and a review date, with an annual operating programme behind it. On the estate we manage for a utility the objectives run water and soil protection first, then biodiversity and native composition, then resilience and continuous canopy cover, then landscape, then timber — which gives way where it would compromise the others, and pays for all of them.
How do you report to an owner?
Fortnightly supervision during operations, weekly reporting, a close-off report for every sale that reconciles felled volume, volume sold and assortment out-turn, and an annual report of the revenue and the programme it funded. Every departure from the plan is recorded with its reason.
Can you manage a forest we own for another purpose — a catchment, a generating station, a road?
Yes — much of our management work is exactly that. Reservoir catchments, generating stations, wind and solar sites, lines and roads: the forest is there to protect something else, and it is managed to a standard that stands up to an audit, a licence inspection and a member of the public.
Managing a forest, or about to?
Tell us about the estate. A forester replies within one working day. The first call is free.