Postdoctoral Fellow : Dr James Weldon

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Project Summary

Driven by a changing climate and increased international trade tree disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent and more severe. This is at a time when tree planting is a central feature of environmental policy, both globally and in Wales. Accordingly, my PhD took the catastrophic loss of trees to disease, as the starting point of analysis. It explored the processes, practices and narratives involved in the restoration of treescapes from disease.

Many conservation efforts are grounded in the view that nature should be preserved with minimum human interference. However, a core finding from my thesis was that disease resulted in conservationists and environmental managers embracing non-native and hybrid organisms, organisms that have been introduced or created by humanity. These beliefs about the value of humanity’s influence on natural spaces provides a core question that these restoration efforts bring to the wider field of conservation: In a discipline characterised by the desire to retain historic ecosystems, how do conservationists both respond to and marshal novelty and novel ecosystems in service of building resilient futures? In this fellowship I will develop this thinking in relation to the following three themes: Non-native speices; Defining ‘treescapes’; Hybrid organisms.

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Goals for the Fellowship

1. Produce high-quality publications to establish a track record and ensure maximum impact of PhD.
   1. A paper proposing a more holistic multispecies definition of the term treescape
   2. A paper interrogating both the spatial and temporal dimensions of the phrase the ‘right tree in the right place’
2. Present papers at two international conferences.
   1. British Ecological Society Conference
   2. Association of American Geographers Meeting
3. Disseminate research to environmental policymakers and practitioners through seminars directed at restoration decision-makers and conservationists and Environmental Platform Wales. 
4. Develop a Postdoctoral funding application for research project titled ‘Hybrid Futures’
5. Disseminate PhD research to general audience
   1. Article in The Conversation on the changing role of ‘nativeness’ in treescape management
6. Work towards the publication of edited handbook Routledge International Handbook of Planetary Health, build the international network associated with this book.

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Advice for Future Applicants

Think closely about what aspects of your PhD you want to develop further. Are there any particular chapters or ideas which you found interesting or exciting which you did not have time or space to fully develop when writing your PhD? For me these were things that came out of discussions with my supervisors in the later stages of writing up and in my Viva.

Be aware that 9-months is a very short amount of time and so be reasonable with what you can expect to achieve.

Make sure your enthusiasm for your project comes through in your writing. This was difficult when writing the application at the end of my PhD process as my enthusiasm was probably at a low… but remember why you are interested in your research and why you think it is important!

Get in touch with previous successful applicants – feel free to send me an email

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Publications

Bear, C., Mukherjee, A., Dahl, P. and Weldon, J. 2026. Policy roadmap: Governing food system transparency for sustainability, health, and food safety. Project Report. Cardiff: TITAN Project. Available at: https://titanproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/D7.4-Policy-Roadmap-final.pdf.

Weldon, J., Dahl, P., Bear, C. and Mukherjee, A. 2026. From transparency to implementation: A step-by-step guide to food system transparency. Cardiff: TITAN Project. Available at: https://titanproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/TITAN-Policy_From-transparency-to-implementation-A-step-by-step-guide-to-food-system-transparency-.pdf

Dahl, P., Weldon, J., Bear, C. and Mukherjee, A. 2026. Food system transparency that works for SMEs. Cardiff: TITAN Project. Available at: https://titanproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/TITAN-Policy-brief_Food-system-transparency-that-works-for-SMEs-3.pdf

Weldon, J. et al. 2026. One Health Case Studies: a resource for Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species. Available at: https://www.cms.int/sites/default/files/publication/one-health-case-studies_report_complete_0.pdf

Weldon, J. 2025. The fragmented afterlives of plants: Protecting elm trees from disease in Brighton. Agoriad: A Journal of Spatial Theory, 2, article 2.9.

Walkling, B. et al., 2025. Editorial introduction: Working with fragments. Agoriad: A Journal of Spatial Theory, 2, article 2.1.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-weldon-537b842b4/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kvLixuMAAAAJ&hl=en

Email: weldonjr@cardiff.ac.uk