Privacy policy

Observatree is a partnership project, funded by a number of UK organisations, to set up a tree health early warning system.

Led by Forest Research, partners include: Fera Science Ltd, Forestry Commission England, Scottish Forestry, The National Trust, The Woodland Trust, DEFRA, APHA and The Welsh Government. Supporting the project is National Resources Wales.

The Woodland Trust is the ‘data controller’. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use your personal information. We are required under the data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

If you have provided or will provide us with your personal information when using the Observatree website, this privacy notice is for you. At the Woodland Trust we categorise anyone who collects tree pest and disease information as a Tree Health surveyor on behalf of the Observatree project as a Woodland Trust Volunteer. Further information relating to our Volunteers Privacy Policy can be located here: Volunteer Privacy Policy - Woodland Trust

At the Woodland Trust, your privacy is very important to us. We also think it’s important you know how and why we collect, store, and use your personal information. Our privacy policy explains all of this, it explains what your rights are, and how to contact us. So please read this document carefully.

If you visit any of the Observatree partner’s websites, their privacy policy will apply and you should refer to this for details of how your personal data is collected, stored, used or shared by them as it may differ from The Woodland Trust.

1. Changes to this privacy policy

Before we get started, you need to know we will update this privacy policy from time to time. This could be because we change how we use your information, or if there are changes to the law.

2. Who are we?

We’re the Woodland Trust and we care about the UK’s woods and trees. This policy talks about us as the Woodland Trust, ‘we’ or ‘us’. We’re a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 294344) and in Scotland (No. SC038885). We’re a non-profit making company limited by guarantee. Registered in England (No. 1982873) at Kempton Way, Grantham, Lincolnshire, NG31 6LL. This policy also includes Woodland Trust (Enterprises) Limited (registered in England No. 2296645). This is a company we own. We use it to raise money to help us do our charity work.

3. How do we use your personal information?

By law, we can only collect personal details if we have a genuine legal reason to do so. This is called the ‘lawful basis for processing’. Most commonly, we will use your personal data where:

• It is necessary for our legitimate interests and your interests and fundamental rights do not override our legitimate interests.
• We need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
• You have consented for us to do so.

We will comply with data protection law. This says that the personal information we hold about you must be:

1. Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
2. Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
3. Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
4. Accurate and kept up to date.
5. Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
6. Kept securely.

4. The Woodland Trusts Legitimate Interests

The Woodland Trust has a legitimate interest in processing personal information before, during and after the end of your volunteering relationship and contact with us on the basis that processing your personal information allows the Woodland Trust to advance its aims and objectives using the valued help provided by our volunteers. Our legitimate interests include:

• Carrying out research and surveys about our services and your volunteering experience.
• Maintaining accurate and up-to-date records and contact details (including details of who to contact in the event of an emergency)
• Ensuring effective general business administration
• Protecting our security, guarding against fraud and other wrongdoing
• Keeping internal records of your dealings with us, enabling us to address any questions you may raise.
• Following up your dealings with us, enabling us to improve our services, or to address any concerns or complaints you have raised.
• Protecting our business and our website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data) enabling us to effectively operate our IT systems, provide network security, and to prevent fraud.
• To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, supporter relationships and experiences, enabling us to study how supporters use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy (for example, we may use the information to customise our website according to your interests)
• Protect, manage and maintain your volunteering activity with us.

5. What personal information do we collect and use?

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about you where you can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data). There are "special categories"/ more sensitive personal data which require a higher level of protection by us. We will normally only collect and process special category data if you volunteer with us.

You may provide us with personal information when you access our website or when you apply to us to be a Tree Health Surveyor. The personal information we collect, and our use of that personal information will vary depending on the nature of your communication with us.

We collect, store, and use the following categories of personal and sensitive information about you:

Tree Health Surveyors

When you apply to be a Tree Health Surveyor you will be required to apply to the Woodland Trust to be accepted as a volunteer. Where you have applied or are proposing to apply to be a Tree Health Surveyor, reference should be made to the Volunteer Privacy Policy - Woodland Trust for further information as to how we process your volunteering personal information.

Observatree Website Usage

We have set out below the personal information we collect when you use the Observatree website, and what we use your personal information for:

Subscribe for Updates

Where you wish to subscribe for Observatree news updates, we will ask you to provide information such as, first name, surname and email address. We will also ask you to confirm that you are over the age of 16, and where you are not over the age of 16 that you have your parent or guardian’s consent to provide information. We use this information to provide you with our Observatree news updates so that we can keep you informed.

Contact Us

Where you contact us observatree@woodlandtrust.org.uk, we may ask you to provide further information so that we can assist you with your query.

Online Blog

Where you provide a Blog for the Observatree website, or where you wish to comment on another user’s Blog, we will collect your name and email address, together with your Blog or Blog comments. We collect this information so that we may know who is providing the Blog or the Blog comments. We reserve the right to not publish any Blog or Blog comments where the content is considered by us, in our absolute discretion, as inappropriate.

Technical Data Usage

This includes information about how you use the Observatree website, your internet protocol (IP) address, your username and password (in a non-readable format) where you have created a Observatree Volunteer Area registration, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access our website. We collect this personal data when you visit the Observatree website by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. Please see our Cookie Policy for further details.

6. Do we share your personal information?

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason, and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your information for an unrelated purpose, we will contact you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

We’ll never sell or rent your information to anyone else. But we may need to share your personal information when the law tells us to, or for the following reasons:

• If you’ve agreed that we can.
• When we use other companies to provide services. This could be for sending emails to you in relation to the subscription for Observatree news updates that you have made or when we offer training to our Tree Health Surveyors and we need to provide your personal details to the organisation providing the training
• When services are provided by another company owned by the Woodland Trust.
• When information is shared with other Observatree project partners (e.g. so that their subject matter experts can provide you with an answer to a question you have raised or so that we can provide statistical information about our Tree Health Surveyors)

All the personal information we collect is handled by our staff in the UK. Sometimes our Information Technology services might place your personal information outside of the European Economic Area. When this happens, we’ll make sure it’s done in line with guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

7. How long will we keep your personal information?

We’ll only hold your information for as long as we have a genuine reason to keep it and in line with our organisational retention schedules.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer tell it is about you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

8. What are your rights?

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us. Your rights in connection with personal information Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

1. Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request/DSAR"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
2. Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
3. Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us to continue to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below). Please note: We are legally required to retain certain personal details such as HMRC, Gift Aid etc.
4. Object to processing your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
5. Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
6. Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact our offices:

• By telephone: 0330 333 3300
• By email: supporterservices@woodlandtrust.org.uk
• By post: Woodland Trust, Kempton Way, Grantham, Lincolnshire, NG31 6LL

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we are allowed under the law to charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we can refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

We sometimes need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

Right to withdraw consent. In the circumstances where you have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent please contact our offices using the above information.

Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, as per UK GDPR we will complete our request within one calendar month, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.

9. How do we keep your personal information safe?

We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information. Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure. We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.

In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

10. Cookies

As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical and Usage Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical and Usage Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. Please see our Cookie Policy for further details.

11. How to contact us

If you wish to talk through anything in our privacy policy, find out more about your rights or obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, please contact our supporter services team (details at the bottom of this page) who will be happy to help. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our data protection officer who will investigate the matter.

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law, you can complain to the Fundraising Regulator or the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Our data protection team can be contacted by writing to:

Data Protection Team
Woodland Trust
Kempton Way
Grantham
NG31 6LL

Or by emailing: dataprotection@woodlandtrust.org.uk

If you wish to talk to us about anything in the policy or the information, we hold about you please contact our supporter services team:

• By telephone: 0330 333 3300
• By email: enquiries@woodlandtrust.org.uk
• By post: Supporter Services, Woodland Trust, Kempton Way, Grantham, Lincolnshire, NG31 6LL

Please note that calls to our supporter services team are recorded for training and monitoring purposes.

This policy was last updated May 2025