A veteran tree is one that has ancient features but not the great age of an ancient tree, and is a tree of great cultural, landscape, or biodiversity value due to its ecological and habitat features.
A veteran tree is one that has ancient features but not the great age of an ancient tree, and is a tree of great cultural, landscape, or biodiversity value due to its ecological and habitat features.
Ancient trees exist in many forms and sizes, with ages ranging according to species and environment, with some lasting for hundreds of years; smaller trees, such as in orchards, can exhibit veteran characteristics after only a few decades. A girth of more than 3 meters at 1.5 meters could be used as a measure to identify if a tree is a veteran. However, other veteran tree characteristics may be taken into account, and alternative girths may be established for different tree species.[ citation needed ]
Ancient trees often have features of particularly high nature conservation value, such as dead limbs, hollows, rot holes, water pools, seepages, woodpecker holes, splits, loose bark, limbs reaching the ground, and epiphytic plants and lichens. [1] Few of these features are found on younger trees, and they provide habitats and foraging grounds for many species of animals and fungi, some of which are rare. Such features are sometimes removed or damaged by pruning or other arboricultural practices.[ citation needed ]
Ancient trees can be found in various locations, from dense woodlands to hedgerows, village greens, and ancient parks and wood pastures. They thrive in a variety of settings, such as dense woodland, but are more commonly found as hedgerow trees, on village greens, and in ancient parks and other wood pastures.[ citation needed ]
Many of the oldest trees are pollards, which is a method of heavily pruning trees by cutting the tree above the browse height of animals. This cultural practice has mostly died out in the UK, except for street trees.[ citation needed ]
Ancient trees occur more frequently in Great Britain than in many other parts of northern Europe. [2] In the United Kingdom in recent years, these trees are being recorded by the Ancient Tree Hunt so that a national database can be created. Mass participation by thousands of eager volunteers led to the success of this initiative.[ citation needed ]
Although some initiatives have strict rules on how to measure the girth and use GPS devices to document the location of such trees accurately, other schemes rely on members of the public to report large trees. The public has been encouraged to hug big trees in their area to get a measure of their size and report their findings to Natural England or another veteran tree organization. 19th-century maps are also being used to find old trees in places such as Cambridgeshire. [3]
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In Australia, veteran trees are often connected with the social, cultural, and legal practices of the Aboriginal peoples. [4] More recent European history of settlement has also produced historical linkages through individual trees that have survived.
Existing prominent trees were often used as survey points indicating boundaries of both private and government land tenure. Some trees hold an exalted position because they were marked (blazed) by 19th-century explorers. [5]
Australia does not have the history of commons and parkland that help explain these landscape forms elsewhere. The new settlers did however bring with them an appreciation of the value of trees for fuel, fodder, and raw material for building; many of them also showed an appreciation of the amenity value of trees, planting large spreading shade trees on their properties and within their new founded towns and cities.
Many of the ancient trees identified today reflect previous patterns of settlement, showing the economic, cultural, and social organizations influencing the lives of those living on the land. They often display the physical scars of traumatic events both man-made and natural. A tree like this is said to have been veteranized.
There is legislation (in the form of national, state, and local laws) that recognizes the importance of protecting the environment, but activists have identified gaps in the protection afforded veteran trees, particularly in the face of ever-increasing pressures of urban development.
In Italy, general features required in order to identify an Albero Monumentale (literally "monumental tree") are defined by national law number 10 of January 14 2013, Norme per lo sviluppo degli spazi verdi urbani, [6] which also requires Italian municipalities ( comuni ) to take a census of their veteran trees. Defining local standards, census details, and law enforcement aspects such as fines or subsidies related to veteran trees is a matter transferred to the regions, which usually implement specific leggi regionali ('regional laws'). [7]
Silviculture originally was developed to provide timber from forests run as plantations, but now forestry expands to consider non-economic values and ecological values. As a result, these other values are also considered in silvicultural systems that may lead to veteran trees being supported where they exist or created where they have not previously been so considered. The Shelterwood with reserves method is a form of Shelterwood cutting that may do this. [8]
Coppicing is the traditional method in woodland management of cutting down a tree to a stump, which in many species encourages new shoots to grow from the stump or roots, thus ultimately regrowing the tree. A forest or grove that has been subject to coppicing is called a copse or coppice, in which young tree stems are repeatedly cut down to near ground level. The resulting living stumps are called stools. New growth emerges, and after a number of years, the coppiced trees are harvested, and the cycle begins anew. Pollarding is a similar process carried out at a higher level on the tree in order to prevent grazing animals from eating new shoots. Daisugi, is a similar Japanese technique.
Pollarding is a pruning system involving the removal of the upper branches of a tree, which promotes the growth of a dense head of foliage and branches. In ancient Rome, Propertius mentioned pollarding during the 1st century BCE. The practice has occurred commonly in Europe since medieval times, and takes place today in urban areas worldwide, primarily to maintain trees at a determined height or to place new shoots out of the reach of grazing animals.
Bocage is a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture characteristic of parts of northern France, southern England, Ireland, the Netherlands, northern Spain and northern Germany, in regions where pastoral farming is the dominant land use.
Quercus robur, the pedunculate oak or English oak, is a species of flowering plant in the beech and oak family, Fagaceae. It is a large tree, native to most of Europe and western Asia, and is widely cultivated in other temperate regions. It grows on soils of near neutral acidity in the lowlands and is notable for its value to natural ecosystems, supporting a very wide diversity of herbivorous insects and other pests, predators and pathogens.
An arborist, or arboriculturist, is a professional in the practice of arboriculture, which is the cultivation, management, and study of individual trees, shrubs, vines, and other perennial woody plants in dendrology and horticulture.
A hedge or hedgerow is a line of closely spaced shrubs and sometimes trees, planted and trained to form a barrier or to mark the boundary of an area, such as between neighbouring properties. Hedges that are used to separate a road from adjoining fields or one field from another, and are of sufficient age to incorporate larger trees, are known as hedgerows. Often they serve as windbreaks to improve conditions for the adjacent crops, as in bocage country. When clipped and maintained, hedges are also a simple form of topiary.
Common land is collective land in which all persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel.
Thinning is a term used in agricultural sciences to mean the removal of some plants, or parts of plants, to make room for the growth of others. Selective removal of parts of a plant such as branches, buds, or roots is typically known as pruning.
Silviculture is the practice of controlling the growth, composition/structure, as well as quality of forests to meet values and needs, specifically timber production.
In the United Kingdom, ancient woodland is that which has existed continuously since 1600 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.
Clearcutting, clearfelling or clearcut logging is a forestry/logging practice in which most or all trees in an area are uniformly cut down. Along with shelterwood and seed tree harvests, it is used by foresters to create certain types of forest ecosystems and to promote select species that require an abundance of sunlight or grow in large, even-age stands. Logging companies and forest-worker unions in some countries support the practice for scientific, safety and economic reasons, while detractors consider it a form of deforestation that destroys natural habitats and contributes to climate change. Environmentalists, traditional owners, local residents and others have regularly campaigned against clearcutting, including through the use of blockades and nonviolent direct action.
The Howardian Hills are a range of hills in England located between the Yorkshire Wolds, the North York Moors, and the Vale of York. They are named after the Howard family, who still own land locally, and have been designated a National Landscape.
Articles on forestry topics include:.
Savernake Forest stands on a Cretaceous chalk plateau between Marlborough and Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, England. Its area is approximately 4,500 acres.
Selection cutting, also known as selection system, is the silvicultural practice of harvesting trees in a way that moves a forest stand towards an uneven-aged or all-aged condition, or 'structure'. Using stocking models derived from the study of old growth forests, selection cutting, also known as 'selection system', or 'selection silviculture', manages the establishment, continued growth and final harvest of multiple age classes of trees within a stand. A closely related approach to forest management is Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), which makes use of selection systems to achieve a permanently irregular stand structure.
Shelterwood cutting removes part of the old forest stand to allow for a natural establishment of seedlings under the cover of the remaining trees. Initial cuttings give just enough light to allow for the regeneration of desired species. Subsequent cuttings give the new seedlings more light and fully pass the growing space to the new generation. Shelterwood systems have many variations and can be adapted to site conditions and the goals of the landowner. There are concerns associated with this silvicultural system due to windthrow and high costs as well as advantages due to improved aesthetics and cost savings from natural regeneration.
A forest stand is a contiguous community of trees sufficiently uniform in composition, structure, age, size, class, distribution, spatial arrangement, condition, or location on a site of uniform quality to distinguish it from adjacent communities.
Tree girth is a measurement of the circumference of tree trunk. It is one of the most ancient, quickest, and simplest of foresters' measures of size and records of growth of living and standing trees. The methods and equipment have been standardized differently in different countries. A popular use of this measurement is to compare outstanding individual trees from different locations or of different species.
Trees have a wide variety of sizes and shapes and growth habits. Specimens may grow as individual trunks, multitrunk masses, coppices, clonal colonies, or even more exotic tree complexes. Most champion tree programs focus finding and measuring the largest single-trunk example of each species. There are three basic parameters commonly measured to characterize the size of a single trunk tree: tree height measurement, tree girth measurement, and tree crown measurement. Foresters also perform tree volume measurements. A detailed guideline to these basic measurements is provided in The Tree Measuring Guidelines of the Eastern Native Tree Society by Will Blozan.
The Newland Oak was a veteran oak tree in Newland, Gloucestershire in England. Originally part of the ancient woodland of the Forest of Dean, it survived clearances that created the settlement of Newland and was afterwards pollarded for timber. Its large size was often remarked upon through the years and it was considered a rival to the Cowthorpe Oak as the largest oak tree in Great Britain. Much of the tree fell during heavy snow in 1955 but a single branch of the tree survived until 1970 when it was killed during an arson attack. A replacement tree grown from one of the Newland Oak's acorns had been planted in 1964.
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