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 area of land dominated by 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.
Forestry is the science and craft of creating, managing, planting, using, conserving and repairing forests and woodlands for associated resources for human and environmental benefits. Forestry is practiced in plantations and natural stands. The science of forestry has elements that belong to the biological, physical, social, political and managerial sciences. Forest management plays an essential role in the creation and modification of habitats and affects ecosystem services provisioning.
Beech (Fagus) is a genus of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Eurasia and North America. Recent classifications recognize 10 to 13 species in two distinct subgenera, Engleriana and Fagus. The Engleriana subgenus is found only in East Asia, distinctive for its low branches, often made up of several major trunks with yellowish bark. The better known Fagus subgenus beeches are high-branching with tall, stout trunks and smooth silver-grey bark. The European beech is the most commonly cultivated.
Fagus sylvatica, the European beech or common beech is a deciduous tree belonging to the beech family Fagaceae.
An old-growth forest, sometimes synonymous with primary forest, virgin forest, late seral forest, primeval forest, first-growth forest, or mature forest—is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance, and thereby exhibits unique ecological features, and might be classified as a climax community. 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. More than one-third of the world's forests are primary forests. Old-growth features include diverse tree-related structures that provide diverse wildlife habitat 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, an ancient woodland is a woodland that has existed continuously since 1600 or before in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Planting of woodland was uncommon before those dates, so a wood present in 1600 is likely to have developed naturally.
Silvopasture is the practice of integrating trees, forage, and the grazing of domesticated animals in a mutually beneficial way. It utilizes the principles of managed grazing, and it is one of several distinct forms of agroforestry.
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.
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 94 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, these forests here were allowed to proceed 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.
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.
Close to nature forestry is a management approach treating forest as an ecological system performing multiple functions. Close to nature silviculture tries to achieve the management objectives with minimum necessary human intervention aimed at accelerating the processes that nature would do by itself more slowly. It works with natural populations of trees, ongoing processes and existing structures using cognitive approach, as in the case of uneven-aged forest (Plenterwald). Its theory and practice takes forest as a self regulating ecosystem and manages it as such.
British wildwood, or simply the wildwood, is the wholly natural forested landscape that developed across major parts of Prehistoric Britain after the last ice age. It existed as the main climax vegetation in Britain for several millennia as the result of 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, this wildwood gradually gave way to open plains and fields as human populations increased and began to significantly shape and exploit the land to their advantage. The wildwood concept has been especially popularized by ecologist and countryside historian Oliver Rackham in his various works
The history of the forest in Central Europe 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 20,779 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 1085 m on the Snowdon Massif.
The wood-pasture hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis positing that open and semi-open pastures and wood-pastures formed the predominant type of landscape in post-glacial Europe, rather than the common belief of primeval forests. The hypothesis proposes that such a landscape would be formed and maintained by large wild herbivores. Although others, including Oliver Rackham, who criticised the idea of an all-encompassing, dark primeval forest in pre-neolithic Europe, had previously expressed similar ideas, it was Dutch researcher Frans Vera, who, in his 2000 book Grazing Ecology and Forest History, first developed a comprehensive framework for such ideas and formulated them into a theorem. Vera's proposals, although highly controversial, came at a time when the role grazers played in woodlands was increasingly being reconsidered, and are credited for ushering in a period of increased reassesment and interdisciplinary research in European conservation theory and practice. Although Vera largely focused his research on the European situation, his findings could also be applied to other temperate ecological regions worldwide, especially the broadleaved ones.
