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Field of research | Forestry |
|---|---|
Chief Scientist | Prof Chris Quine |
| Address | Alice Holt Forest |
| Location | Hampshire, UK |
Operating agency | Forestry Research |
| Website | Forestry Research |
The Alice Holt Research Station is one of two British forestry research institutes, and is located in north-east Hampshire.
It was established as a Forestry Research Station in 1946 by the Forestry Commission near Wrecclesham. The forest estate had 1,225,000 acres.
By the late 1950s it had an international reputation. A £134,000 extension was opened in the summer of 1959, which enable the Commission to have its central seed store at the site for varieties such as Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, Corsican pine, and Norway spruce. The store was mostly for conifers, keeping seeds up to four years. and also acorns had been stored up to three years.
More laboratories were added in the late 1970s.
In 1948 it began experimenting with Metasequoia glyptostroboides , the dawn redwood, with a view to produce timber.
In the late 1950s its scientists were among the first people to investigate biological data with computers, when they discovered why the Douglas-fir did not grow well in south-east England, which they found was due to temperature and rooting depth. It was through computers that many solutions were found. The station found a new way to determine daily tree growth with vernier scales. Computers investigated ways to classify trees by leaf character. It notably conducted research into eucalyptus and poplar trees.
In April 1973 it found that Dutch elm disease had been imported on Rock Elm logs from North America. The disease had first appeared in 1965. The disease had originally been shipped to the North America from Britain in the 1930s. The disease in Britain had then become less known. There were outbreaks of the disease in 1965 in north Gloucestershire and in 1967 in south Essex. Two scientists at the station discovered two strains of the disease. The areas affected were southern Hampshire, north-west Kent, the Severn valley, and Ipswich. The scientists realised that these outbreaks could have been prevented by controlling imports of logs. It had been assumed that as Britain had the disease in the 1930s that trees would not be affected. By 1984 Dutch elm disease had reached Scotland. Other diseases of trees to be controlled were Oak wilt and Chestnut blight.
In 1973 it looked at ways to control the grey squirrel.
It is situated next to Birdworld in the Alice Holt Forest in East Hampshire off the A325, east of Bentley railway station on the Alton Line, which follows the River Wey. The nearest inhabitation is Rowledge in Surrey, on the Hampshire boundary. Although now in Hampshire, similar to Birdworld, the site is in the religious parish of Rowledge in Surrey.
The Douglas fir is an evergreen conifer species in the pine family, Pinaceae. It is native to western North America and is also known as Douglas-fir, Douglas spruce, Oregon pine, and Columbian pine. There are three varieties: coast Douglas-fir, Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir and Mexican Douglas-fir.
Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees comprising the flowering plant genus Ulmus in the plant family Ulmaceae. The genus first appeared in the Miocene geological period about 20 million years ago, originating in what is now central Asia. These trees flourished and spread over most of the Northern Hemisphere, inhabiting the temperate and tropical-montane regions of North America and Eurasia, presently ranging southward in the Middle East to Lebanon, and Israel, and across the Equator in the Far East into Indonesia.
The Forestry Commission is a non-ministerial government department responsible for the management of publicly owned forests and the regulation of both public and private forestry in England. It was formerly also responsible for Forestry in Wales and Scotland, however on 1 April 2013, Forestry Commission Wales merged with other agencies to become Natural Resources Wales, whilst two new bodies were established in Scotland on 1 April 2019.
A spruce is a tree of the genus Picea, a genus of about 35 species of coniferous evergreen trees in the family Pinaceae, found in the northern temperate and boreal (taiga) regions of the Earth. Picea is the sole genus in the subfamily Piceoideae. Spruces are large trees, from about 20 to 60 m tall when mature, and have whorled branches and conical form. They can be distinguished from other members of the pine family by their needles (leaves), which are four-sided and attached singly to small persistent peg-like structures on the branches, and by their cones, which hang downwards after they are pollinated. The needles are shed when 4–10 years old, leaving the branches rough with the retained pegs. In other similar genera, the branches are fairly smooth.
Dutch elm disease (DED) is caused by a member of the sac fungi (Ascomycota) affecting elm trees, and is spread by elm bark beetles. Although believed to be originally native to Asia, the disease was accidentally introduced into America and Europe, where it has devastated native populations of elms that did not have resistance to the disease. It has also reached New Zealand. The name "Dutch elm disease" refers to its identification in 1921 and later in the Netherlands by Dutch phytopathologists Bea Schwarz and Christine Buisman, who both worked with professor Johanna Westerdijk. The disease affects species in the genera Ulmus and Zelkova; therefore it is not specific to the Dutch elm hybrid.
Ulmus minor subsp. minor, the smooth-leaved elm, narrow-leaved elm or East Anglian elm, is a subspecies of the field elm native to southern Europe and Asia Minor including Iran.
Silviculture is the practice of controlling the growth, composition/structure, and quality of forests to meet values and needs, specifically timber production.
Picea rubens, commonly known as red spruce, is a species of spruce native to eastern North America, ranging from eastern Quebec and Nova Scotia, west to the Adirondack Mountains and south through New England along the Appalachians to western North Carolina. This species is also known as yellow spruce, West Virginia spruce, eastern spruce, and he-balsam.
Ulmus 'Clusius' is a Dutch hybrid elm cultivar raised at the Dorschkamp Research Institute for Forestry & Landscape Planning, Wageningen, and released to commerce in 1983. 'Clusius' was derived from a crossing of the same Dutch clones that produced the fastigiate 'Lobel' released in 1973: '202' and '336'.
The hybrid cultivar Ulmus × hollandica 'Cicestria', commonly known as the 'Chichester Elm', was cloned at the beginning of the 18th century from a tree growing at Chichester Hall, Rawreth, near Danbury, Essex, England, then the home of Thomas Holt White FRS, brother of the naturalist Gilbert White. The tree was first recorded by country parson and botanist Adam Buddle in south-east Essex in 1711. 'Cicestria' is the original Ulmus × hollandica 'Vegeta', but suffered confusion with the later Huntingdon Elm cultivar by John Claudius Loudon who, without consulting Lindley, accorded the epithet 'Vegeta' to Huntingdon Elm in 1838, as he found the two indistinguishable. Chichester Elm appeared as U. cicestria in an 1801 catalogue.
Rowledge is a village in England on the Surrey–Hampshire border, centred south of the A31 and Farnham. Neighbouring villages include Wrecclesham, Spreakley and Frensham. To the south west of the village is the Alice Holt Forest; to the west is Birdworld. It is in the Waverley Ward of Farnham, Wrecclesham and Rowledge.
Alice Holt Forest is a royal forest in Hampshire, situated some 4 miles (6.4 km) south of Farnham, Surrey. Once predominantly an ancient oak forest, it was particularly noted in the 18th and 19th centuries for the timber it supplied for the building of ships for the Royal Navy. It is now planted mainly with conifers. Forestry England took over the management of the forest in 1924, and a research station was set up in 1946 in the Alice Holt Lodge, a former manor house. The forest is now part of the South Downs National Park, which was established on 31 March 2010, and it forms the most northerly gateway to the park.
Choristoneura fumiferana, the eastern spruce budworm, is a species of moth of the family Tortricidae native to the eastern United States and Canada. The caterpillars feed on the needles of spruce and fir trees. Eastern spruce budworm populations can experience significant oscillations, with large outbreaks sometimes resulting in wide scale tree mortality. The first recorded outbreaks of the spruce budworm in the United States occurred in about 1807, and since 1909 there have been waves of budworm outbreaks throughout the eastern United States and Canada. In Canada, the major outbreaks occurred in periods circa 1910–20, c. 1940–50, and c. 1970–80, each of which impacted millions of hectares of forest. Longer-term tree-ring studies suggest that spruce budworm outbreaks have been recurring approximately every three decades since the 16th century, and paleoecological studies suggest the spruce budworm has been breaking out in eastern North America for thousands of years.
Christmas tree cultivation is an agricultural, forestry, and horticultural occupation which involves growing pine, spruce, and fir trees specifically for use as Christmas trees.
Holt Pound is a hamlet on the A325 road and two side roads and forms a slight projection of the county borders into Surrey in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England. It is between Bordon several miles south and Farnham, which is beyond a strip of its nearest village, Rowledge, which remains its ecclesiastical parish in Surrey and Wrecclesham which touches the town. The village is between the Alice Holt Forest and fields known jointly as Old Kiln Farm and the Holt Pound Enclosure. It has a large 20th-century pub-restaurant and a recreation ground.
Bucks Horn Oak is a small village in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England and is the main community within Alice Holt Forest. A small eastern part consists of buildings facing its main road and of the main management and tourist sites of the surrounding public forest, postally part of the place. In the Church of England the community and all land as far as Bentley railway station (Hampshire) is in a parish mainly in Surrey, a larger community on the north-east of the forest, Rowledge. In the secular, civil parishes in England, it is in the parish of Binsted, equating to the third tier of local government, namely Binsted Civil Parish Council.
The European spruce bark beetle, is a species of beetle in the weevil subfamily Scolytinae, the bark beetles, and is found from Europe to Asia Minor and some parts of Africa.
Spruce broom rust or yellow witches' broom rust is a fungal plant disease caused by the basidiomycete fungus known as Chrysomyxa arctostaphyli. It occurs exclusively in North America, with the most concentrated outbreaks occurring in northern Arizona and southern Colorado on blue and Engelmann spruce, as well as in Alaska on black and white spruce. This disease alternates its life cycle between two hosts, with the spruce serving as the primary host and bearberry serving as the secondary or alternate host. The name for the disease comes from the distinctive “witches broom”, commonly yellow in color, which forms on the spruce after young needles have been infected. Management must be carried out through physical or mechanical methods, such as the pruning of brooms or the removal of the secondary host from the area, because no chemical control measures have yet been determined to be economically effective. Generally, spruce broom rust is seen as a mostly cosmetic issue, and it is very rarely the direct cause of tree death; however, research has shown a reduction in overall productivity and health of infected trees, making it an important issue for logging and timber companies.
The elm cultivar Ulmus 'Crispa Pendula', the weeping fernleaf elm, was listed in the Gardeners' Chronicle & New Horticulturist (1873) as Ulmus crispa pendula, a variety of 'Crispa', itself described as "of the U. montana type".
A tree plantation, forest plantation, plantation forest or timber plantation is a forest planted for high volume production of wood, usually by planting one type of tree as a monoculture forest.
