Making woods resilient has become the latest fashion in forestry as illustrated by the RFS conference being organised with the Woodland Trust in Birmingham at the start of October.ˇ Resilience in this context means resilient both to diseases and to climate change effects.  Much of the thinking is based on the 2015 British Woodlands Resilience Survey which has been organised by the Sylva Foundation and sponsored by Oxford University, the RFS and the Woodland Trust.ˇ There have also been useful presentations on the subject such as the one given at the CONFOR Show (Confederation of Forest industries) show at Longleat, Wiltshire in early September 2015. Read more...

Apologies to anyone who has posted a comment recently that has not appeared beneath the relevant blog. Sadly, the site has been inundated with hundreds of spurious comments / advertising links each day; these have made it next to impossible to isolate the genuine comments.      

Scrub is not woodland per se, but it is often found where woodland starts or ends; or where woodland might develop (e.g. on an abandoned field).Scrub or scrubland is generally vegetation dominated by bushes / shrubs (e.g. blackthorn and hawthorn) with many stems, perhaps reaching to a height of 12 / 15 feet – so that some sort of canopy develops. Many scrub plants are pioneer species, which grow fast and can colonise open habitats quite rapidly. Such pioneer species frequently produce large numbers of seeds (for example, bramble has lots of seeds in the attractive succulent fruits), which are often dispersed by birds (such as thrushes) or by wind – e.g. travellers joy / old man’s beard. Seeds generally germinate better in open grassland than in dense shade. Some scrub species (like blackthorn and gorse) have spines on their stems which are effective in deterring browsing animals (deer, sheep & rabbits) Read more...

One of the things that allowed primitive man to spend less time on sustenance and to extend the range of edible foods was the ability to cook - this depended on lighting fires and later on, crucially, the development of pottery and metal to create containers for cooking.  Modern man (and women) take this for granted but we have mostly moved away from burning wood and instead we cook at home using gas or electricity.   Woodland campers often go back to ancient methods of cooking by lighting fires, but there is now a modern off-grid solution which is a solar powered cooker.  This particular device uses the radiation from the sun just like a domestic solar thermal installation which produces hot water.  The sun's rays are concentrated on a cylinder which is surrounded by a vacuum tube.  To make it work well you need to point the device  towards the sun - a small vertical pin helps you to to know when you have it optimally positioned.  So the key to solar cookers is threefold: concentrating sunlight, converting it to heat energy and trapping this energy. Read more...

In early October,  BBC4 screened a 90-minute documentary capturing every aspect of life in an ancient English oak over an entire year  "Oak Tree: Nature's Greatest Survivor" focuses on a single tree in Wytham Woods, just outside Oxford, a site acquired by Oxford University in 1942 for woodland research.   The film, presented by zoologist, entomologist and broadcaster George McGavin, opens with an high-tech assessment of the tree's condition. By firing laser pulses, forestry scientists create a 3-D virtual image of the oak so they can track its size and shape over the 12 months. At the outset, in late August, it's 19 metres tall and 30 metres wide and carries an estimated 700,000 leaves. Read more...

It is not unusual for owners to allow others to use their woodlands; community groups, scouts, guides, local schools and so on all benefit from spending time in woodlands up and down the country.   Less common is for a charity to use a woodland for pre-deployment training. Jon Mackeen, vice-chairman of DART international UK, a charity based near to the woodland in question, takes up the story: "DART International is a registered UK charity that provides teams of experienced volunteer arborists (tree surgeons) to support worldwide disaster relief operations by removing obstructive trees and enabling other aid and rescue services to operate safely and effectively Read more...

Our trees, woodlands and forests are facing a variety of challenges to their well being, ranging from the changing (and rather variable) nature of our climate (extreme events), habitat fragmentation, the introduction of non-native species (sycamore, turkey oak) and ‘new’ pathogens and pests (some airborne, some travelling on imported plants).  Fortunately, there are also a number of people and organisations who are working on ways to address these challenges. At the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Dr Stephen Cavers, is the leader of the PROTREE project .  Using the Scots Pine as a “representative” of our native tree species, it will look at the following threats / pathogens :- Read more...