Example of a natural beech wood. The forest floor allows beech-seeds (
mast) to take root and replenish the beech wood naturally.
Natural forests has trees from all stages of the life cycle, including dead and decaying trees.
Natural beech wood is a beech wood, that is able to replenish and sustain itself on its own.
Beech is a valued timber, but most beech woods require human intervention to replace old trees, since the young trees are not able to survive at all, or at a rate that sustains the beech population over time. There can be various reasons for this condition. Heavy forest floor coverage of other plants in the spring, shadowing the young beech-shoots, is a common cause. Abundance of nutrient-rich soils will also be difficult to handle for beech woods in the long run.
A natural beech wood has beech trees of all ages, including fallen and dead trees. Other tree species might be mixed in, but not to a degree that threatens the dominant beech.
The term is also used for other tree species, such as 'natural oak wood', 'natural birch wood', etc..
A forest is an ecosystem characterized by a dense community of trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines a forest as, "Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban use." Using this definition, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 found that forests covered 4.06 billion hectares, or approximately 31 percent of the world's land area in 2020.
The Afrotropical realm is one of the Earth's eight biogeographic realms. It includes Sub-Saharan Africa, the southern Arabian Peninsula, the island of Madagascar, and the islands of the western Indian Ocean. It was formerly known as the Ethiopian Zone or Ethiopian Region.
Fagus sylvatica, the European beech or common beech, is a large, graceful deciduous tree in the beech family with smooth silvery-gray bark, large leaf area, and a short trunk with low branches.
An old-growth forest is a forest that has developed over a long period of time without disturbance. Due to this, old-growth forests exhibit unique ecological features. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines primary forests as naturally regenerated forests of native tree species where there are no clearly visible indications of human activity and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed. One-third of the world's forests are primary forests. Old-growth features include diverse tree-related structures that provide diverse wildlife habitats that increases the biodiversity of the forested ecosystem. Virgin or first-growth forests are old-growth forests that have never been logged. The concept of diverse tree structure includes multi-layered canopies and canopy gaps, greatly varying tree heights and diameters, and diverse tree species and classes and sizes of woody debris.
In the United Kingdom, ancient woodland is that which has existed continuously since 1600 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The practice of planting woodland was uncommon before those dates, so a wood present in 1600 is likely to have developed naturally.
Ecoforestry has been defined as selection forestry or restoration forestry. The main idea of ecoforestry is to maintain or restore the forest to standards where the forest may still be harvested for products on a sustainable basis. Ecoforestry is forestry that emphasizes holistic practices which strive to protect and restore ecosystems rather than maximize economic productivity. Sustainability of the forest also comes with uncertainties. There are other factors that may affect the forest furthermore than that of the harvesting. There are internal conditions such as effects of soil compaction, tree damage, disease, fire, and blow down that also directly affect the ecosystem. These factors have to be taken into account when determining the sustainability of a forest. If these factors are added to the harvesting and production that comes out of the forest, then the forest will become less likely to survive, and will then become less sustainable.
The Kellerwald is a low mountain range reaching heights of up to 675 m in the western part of northern Hesse, Germany. Its assets include Germany's largest contiguous beech woodland and it contains Hesse's only national park, the Kellerwald-Edersee National Park. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Forest management is a branch of forestry concerned with overall administrative, legal, economic, and social aspects, as well as scientific and technical aspects, such as silviculture, forest protection, and forest regulation. This includes management for timber, aesthetics, recreation, urban values, water, wildlife, inland and nearshore fisheries, wood products, plant genetic resources, and other forest resource values. Management objectives can be for conservation, utilisation, or a mixture of the two. Techniques include timber extraction, planting and replanting of different species, building and maintenance of roads and pathways through forests, and preventing fire.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and guide to forestry:
The Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi, Monte Falterona, Campigna is a national park in Italy. Created in 1993, it covers an area of about 368 square kilometres (142 sq mi), on the two sides of the Apennine watershed between Romagna and Tuscany, and is divided between the provinces of Forlì Cesena, Arezzo and Florence.
The English Lowlands beech forests is a terrestrial ecoregion in the United Kingdom, as defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the European Environment Agency (EEA). It covers 45,600 km2 (17,600 sq mi) of Southern England, approximately as far as the border with Devon and South Wales in the west, into the Severn valley in the north-west, into the East Midlands in the north, and up to the border of Norfolk in the north-east. The WWF code for this ecoregion is PA0421.
Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe is a transnational serial nature UNESCO World Heritage Site, encompassing 93 component parts in 18 European countries. Together, the sites protect the largest and least disturbed forests dominated by the beech tree. In many of these stands, especially those in the Carpathians, beech forests have persisted without interruption or interference since the last ice age. These sites document the undisturbed postglacial repopulation of the species.
The WeltWald Harz up to 2009 Arboretum Bad Grund, also known as Exotenwald and sometimes called the Arboretum des Forstamtes Grund or the Forstaboretum der Niedersächsischen Landesforstverwaltung, is an arboretum located along the B 242 federal highway near the Hübichenstein, northwest of Bad Grund, Lower Saxony, Germany. It is open daily without charge.
The United Kingdom, being in the British Isles, is ideal for tree growth, thanks to its mild winters, plentiful rainfall, fertile soil and hill-sheltered topography. In the absence of people, much of Great Britain would be covered with mature oaks as well as savannah-type of plains, except for Scotland. Although conditions for forestry are good, trees face threats from fungi, parasites and pests. Nowadays, about 13% of Britain's land surface is wooded. European countries average 39%, but this varies widely from 1% (Malta) to 66% (Finland). As of 2021, government plans call for 30,000 hectares to be reforested each year. Efforts to reach these targets have attracted criticism for planting non-native trees, or trees that are out of place for their surroundings, leading to ecological changes.
Shebenik National Park is a national park in eastern Albania adjacent to the border with North Macedonia. It encompasses 34,507.9 hectares (345.079 km2) and is specifically marked by a mountainous landscape supplied with glacial lakes, valleys, dense coniferous and deciduous forests and alpine meadows and pastures. Elevations in the park vary from 300 metres to over 2,200 metres above the Adriatic at the peak of Shebenik and Jabllanica, hence the name. It dwells a number of endangered species that are fast becoming rare in Southern Europe, including the brown bear, gray wolf and Balkan lynx. The abundance in wildlife can in part be explained by the variety of vegetation types and remote location.
British wildwood, or simply the wildwood, is the natural forested landscape that developed across much of Prehistoric Britain after the last ice age. It existed for several millennia as the main climax vegetation in Britain given the relatively warm and moist post-glacial climate and had not yet been destroyed or modified by human intervention. From the start of the Neolithic period, the wildwood gradually gave way to open plains and fields as human populations grew and people began to significantly shape and exploit the land to their advantage. The wildwood concept has been popularised in particular by ecologist and countryside historian Oliver Rackham in his various works
The history of Central European forests is characterised by thousands of years of exploitation by people. Thus a distinction needs to be made between the botanical natural history of the forest in pre- and proto-historical times—which falls mainly into the fields of natural history and Paleobotany—and the onset of the period of sedentary settlement which began at the latest in the Neolithic era in Central Europe - and thus the use of the forest by people, which is covered by the disciplines of history, archaeology, cultural studies and ecology.
The protected forest area, Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh, is located in the Trancarpathian region of Ukraine and belongs to the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve. It is the largest primeval beech forest worldwide with an area of 8800 ha. Since 1920, some parts of this forest have been protected. In 1992, Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh primeval beech forest was designated as UNESCO World Heritage Site. Later, several other primeval and old-growth beech forests in Europe were included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe as well.
As a primeval beech forest, Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh is an important research hotspot. In 2001, a 10 ha research sample plot was installed in Mala Uholka as part of a Swiss-Ukrainian research project, and in 2010 a full statistical inventory of the primeval forest was carried out. The next inventory is planned in 2019 to detect any changes.
Wales has a surface area of 2,628,779 km2 or 2,077,900 ha. It has a border with England to the east, and is bounded by the Irish Sea to the north and west, and by the Bristol Channel to the south. It has an oceanic temperate climate which is markedly influenced by the North Atlantic Current carrying warm water from tropical latitudes. As a result, it has a much milder climate than most places in the world at similar latitudes. Altitudes range from sea-level to 10985 m on the Snowdon Massif.
Forests cover almost a third of Turkey. They are almost all state-owned, and vary from temperate rainforest in the north-east to maquis in the south and west. Pine, fir, oak and beech are common.
