The county's favourite laboratory

But the wood’s greatness extends far beyond all this. Lord Krebs, the eminent Oxford professor who began his research career back in the 1960s by studying at Wytham, puts it in these terms.

“If there were a Nobel Prize for ecology, and if you could award it to a place rather than a person, Wytham Woods would surely be a prime candidate. It is almost certainly unmatched anywhere in the world as a place of sustained, intensive ecological research extending over nearly three-quarters of a century.”

It is now 60 years since the Nature Conservancy decided to designate the woods on the western edge of Oxford as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, making it one of the first SSSIs in the country.

The woods, bequeathed to Oxford University by Raymond ffennell in 1942, was back then apparently considered an ordinary bit of woodland and grasslands — a strange thought for anyone who has seen the 350-hectare wood at this time of year, carpeted in bluebells and ringing with the sound of spring birdsong.

Unlike the other chosen sites, Wytham Woods, tucked into a loop in the River Thames, was not particularly notable for rare species or as an outstanding example of its type. What had, however, made it special was that the wood had already been the subject of a continuous ecological research programmes dating back to the 1920s, a level of continuity of research effort that was almost unique.

The SSSI ensured its iconic status as the ultimate ecological laboratory, becoming Britain’s most studied wood and home to an extraordinary series of investigations by researchers from Oxford University.

According to Dr Keith Kirby, Natural England’s forestry and woodlands officer, there are parts of the woods where every single tree has been measured.

Dr Kirby, who started his research career in the bramble patches at Wytham, said: “They have been studied literally from top to bottom with researchers using towers, walkways, ropes and cherry pickers to understand how the forest canopy grows and takes carbon.”

Other long-running studies of small birds and mammals have carefully charted population peaks and troughs over decades, with the results helping to address many of the most important questions facing wildlife conservation today. Studies on caterpillars, oak trees and blue tits have pinpointed how climate change may affect our wildlife.

A fortnight ago, ecologists gathered in the woods to celebrate 60 years of scientific discovery along with the publication of a new book Wytham Woods: Oxford’s Ecological Laboratory, published by Oxford University Press, which tells the story of the different projects that have taken place over the past six decades and the people involved.

For it has played a vital role in training generations of British ecologists, with some 150 PhD students and a comparable number of other researchers— post-docs, research assistants and visitors — having carried out research at Wytham.

Lord Krebs of Wytham said every young ecologist was conscious of the impressive scientific footsteps that they were following.

He recalls: “When I began my research career in 1966 as a DPhil student working on population regulation of great tits in Wytham, I already felt as though I was following a long line of dauntingly important and clever predecessors stretching back to 1947, when David Lack started the tit studies. Now I realise that I was, if not in the pioneer group, at least one of the early settlers.”

The work goes on and on. Most of the great tits at Wytham are individually known, including when and where they were hatched and who the parents are. Two years ago researchers showed that great tits in the woods have adapted their breeding to fit warmer springs.

But for Lord Krebs, like many other ecologists who have spent years in Wytham, the woods are a place of beauty as well as a source of data.

“For me,” he said, “it is hard to match the sensation of inhaling the scent of a carpet of damp moss on a February morning and the first, green buds of hawthorn that foretell the arrival of spring.”

The ecological concepts and discoveries based on work carried out at Wytham, he says, read like a textbook of ecology: covering such key areas as natural selection in action to the chemical defences of plants against insects.

In the preface to the new book, Lord Krebs says it all came about not as a result of any long-term strategic plan but rather as a result of “a lucky concatenation of circumstances”, with the donation of the woodlands providing the long-term security.

For many visitors to Wytham, sightings of elusive mammals are among their most treasured encounters. The badgers of Wytham Woods can now count themselves as internationally famous, with the work focused on them now recognised as one of the most comprehensive long-term studies of medium-sized carnivores ever undertaken.

Much of it is thanks to Hans Kruuk, who began working in the woods in 1972, having previously undertaken pioneering studies of hyaenas in the Serengeti. By the time he left Oxford in 1977, he had revolutionised the world’s knowledge of badgers.

He can also be credited with taking on David Macdonald, who has gone on to become one of the world’s great authorities on foxes, making television history along the way by producing the first broadcast quality infrared night vision images in the BBC’s Night of the Fox in 1976.

Since their inception in 1987, the four annual badger trap-ups in Wytham have resulted in more than 8,600 captures of more than 300 individual badgers. Much of the work has centred on understanding badger population. With badger populations increasing nationally some had claimed that this was due to increased levels of protection.

With the Wytham numbers increasing at a similar rate without any change in protection, the Oxford ecologists were able to show the increases could be explained by climate, not changes in protection.

Researchers have also been able to establish the extent to which badgers are susceptible to road traffic accidents, with about 50 per cent of Wytham’s annual badger mortality attributed to road accidents. They showed the number of such deaths was directly linked to changing temperature, because badgers were more likely to leave their setts for foraging trips when temperatures were milder.

Many other areas of research have also provided valuable practical information.

For example, work on abandoned wheat fields tracked its recolonisation by plants of chalk grassland; research on fox populations showed how they use the surrounding countryside; and the pressure on woodland from rising deer numbers was underlined by studies into changes into the abundance of woodland plants.

University scientists are sometimes asked just how much more there is really to find out about the wood and its inhabitants after so much effort over 60 years.

Lord Krebs argues that, in many ways, the value of the long-term records merely grows over time, offering crucial insights into the response of the natural world to climate change. At the same time new questions can be asked and answered thanks to new techniques, such as DNA fingerprinting, radio-tracking and satellite imagery.

Not surprisingly, Wytham Woods became one of the eight founding sites in the Environmental Change Network (ECN). Established in 1993, by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the ECN now features 12 terrestrial and 45 freshwater sites regularly monitored to detect the impact of environmental change.

In spring 2008, an international collaboration got under way in the woods, between the HSBC bank, and the Oxford-based environmental charity Earthwatch, which is researching the impacts of climate change on managed forest eco-systems.

Ultimately, like every other field, fell or cul-de-sac in Britain, Wytham Woods is heavily influenced by human activity. Future conservationists will surely benefit from insights that are still to come.

Whatever lies ahead over the next 60 years, Wytham Woods will stand not just as a laboratory, but also a magnificent monument to Oxford’s determination not to overlook the environmental changes happening right on its own doorstep.