A new national forestry education program, built on a century of professional training and designed to meet the demands of a rapidly changing sector, has graduated its first cohort. The milestone is the subject of a perspective piece published in Australian Forestry by P. Kanowski, R. Keenan, J. O'Reilly-Wapstra, M.R. Ghaffariyan, A. Spokevicius and D. Weber, tracing the arc of national forestry education from its origins in 1926 to the Graduate Certificate in Forestry that welcomed students for the first time in 2024. 

The Australian Forestry School was established at the University of Adelaide in 1926 before transferring to Canberra as a Commonwealth entity in 1927. And for most of the twentieth century it served not only Australian students but cohorts from across the wider region, including Burma, Malaysia and New Zealand. The Victorian School of Forestry at Creswick, established in 1910, ran a parallel programme with both eventually folded into the Australian National University and University of Melbourne respectively. 

"Changes in the structure and funding of Australian higher education have made it difficult to maintain relatively small, focused professional programs such as forestry," according to Julianne O'Reilly-Wapstra, Professor, Forest Sciences and Course Coordinator for the University of Tasmania's Graduate Certificate of Forestry. "The Graduate Certificate in Forestry has been designed with, and is financially supported by, the forest industry."  

"This program demonstrates a new era of university-industry collaboration to meet the need for skilled forestry professionals and support universities' capacity to deliver specialist forestry education. This collaboration provides a sound basis for developing the future education needs to support sustainable forest management." 

Forestry Australia kicked off a fresh round of industry and university discussions in 2022, establishing a Committee on the Future of Forestry Education. The result was the Graduate Certificate in Forestry, hosted by the University of Tasmania and drawing on courses contributed by Adelaide University, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Tasmania. Industry partners are financially supporting a minimum of 18 students annually across each course for an initial five-year term, with the Federal Government supporting a program coordinator through the Forestry Workforce Training Program managed by ForestWorks, for the first three years of the five-year term. 

The four-course program covers Introduction to Australian Forestry, Carbon Forestry, Plantation Silviculture and Forest Operations, each delivered in a mixed format combining online live-time learning with lecturers and a five-day residential field school. The program is designed to bring professionally employed staff without formal forestry qualifications into the discipline, while also offering a pathway for those with TAFE qualifications and recognised prior learning and/or industry experience. 

Beyond curriculum, the program revives something the profession has been without for a generation — the national professional networks that were a defining feature of residential forestry study at the AFS and ANU, giving the next generation of forest managers the opportunity to learn with, and from, each other across regional field-based settings. 

"This marks a significant step in rebuilding national forestry education capacity in Australia," according to Dr Mohammad R. Ghaffariyan, the Managing Editor of the Australian Forestry Journal. "The program responds directly to industry needs while strengthening the professional networks that underpin the sector. We are pleased to document this important development." 

The paper was published online on 21 April 2026 and appears in Australian Forestry. It is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00049158.2026.2653333. 

For more information: Kanowski, P., Keenan, R., O'Reilly-Wapstra, J., Ghaffariyan, M.R., Spokevicius, A., & Weber, D. (2026). National forestry education in Australia, 100 years on. Australian Forestry. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049158.2026.2653333 

About Forestry Australia 

Forestry Australia is the peak professional body for foresters, forest scientists, private forestry and commercial tree growing in Australia. With more than 1,100 members spanning research, industry and government, Forestry Australia advances the profession through education, events, policy engagement and scientific publication. It publishes Australian Forestry, one of the longest-running forestry journals in the Southern Hemisphere. 

About Australian Forestry 

Australian Forestry is the peer-reviewed scientific journal of Forestry Australia, now in its 100th year of continuous publication. The journal covers forest science, management, policy and ecology, with a particular focus on Australian and Southern Hemisphere conditions. It is published by Taylor & Francis and indexed in major scientific databases. The current managing editor is Dr Mohammad Ghaffariyan of the University of the Sunshine Coast. 

ENDS

Media contact: Jason Ross, Marketing and Communications Manager, Forestry Australia. 0448 190 055 / communications@forestry.org.au