Woodlands For Wales.

[Eryri]

The Welsh government has today published the Woodlands for Wales action plan which sets out how, over the next five years, the One Wales government and its partners will work towards achieving the outcomes of Woodlands for Wales, the 50 year strategy for trees and woodlands.

Woodlands For Wales

The Woodlands for Wales strategy recognises how important woodlands and trees are in delivering social, economic and environmental benefits and tackling climate change.The action plan was developed by Forestry Commission Wales on behalf of the One Wales Government.

[Digit]

Has anybody seen in recent years a government policy that doesn't include the words, 'GLOBAL WARMING?

Roy.

[RKB]

Originally Posted by Digit

Has anybody seen in recent years a government policy that doesn't include the words, 'GLOBAL WARMING?

Roy.

It actually says 'climate change', and if it's right (which the vast majority of scientists worldwide think it is), then you should be glad that it permeates most decisions.

[Digit]

if it's right

Of course it's right, who ever heard of a static climate.

Roy.

[Eryri]

The climate changes is accurately measured by peat core analysis, with amny studies on radio carbon dating and pollen accumulations in both upland and lowland peat bogs. It's by dominant plant species and goes as follows :

Study1
Study2

9999 years ago : No plants, just ice.
9700 years ago : Juniper forest.
9500 years ago : Birch forest.
9300 years ago : Hazel forest.
8500 years ago : Oak forest.
7750 years ago : Alder forest, some elm and pine.

5000 years ago : Significant impact of human activity begins.

4000 years ago : Shrubs. (Neolithic to Iron Age)
3000 years ago : Grass (Celtic)
2000 years ago : Mixed forest and sycamore. (Roman)
1500 years ago : Oak forest (Britannic)
1000 years ago : Heather explosion. (Norman)
600 years ago : Wheat and Barley.(Medieval)
500 years ago : Grass and Shrub. (Tudor)
100 years ago : Foreign pines. (Victorian - Industrial)

What is clear is that there was significant increases and decreases in average annual temperature as well as humidity since the last ice age and that this pre-dates any significant impact of human activity. It also shows that the effect of human activity since then has been reactive to natural increases and decreases in average annual temperature. One of the significant bands in peat deposits is the 'heather explosion' which occurred two hundred years earlier in England than in Wales and is due to 'Normanisation' of agriculture (absent in Scotland untill the clearances). Another significant event some 400 years later was that even in upland Wales during the medieval warm dry period there were extensive arable crops. This was followed by a wetter and colder period, which we still have.

So what is our 'proper' un-man-made climate ?
There is a problem with the 'Woodlands for Wales' initiative, and that is to replace the foreign pines, what trees do we plant ?

[Dorts]

Interesting piece. One question and two answers from me.
'9999 years ago : No plants, just ice'.
Archaeologists have recently discovered in the N.E. of England hut circles, date 11,000 years ago.
Q. How come if nothing but ice? A.There must have been an interglacial warm period prior to that date.

Q. 'what trees do we plant?'
A. We don't, we let nature take its course. It has worked round these parts with superb results.
Dorts.

[Eryri]

This climate evidence before 10,000 years tends to be found in the clays of estuaries, lake deposits and in caves, and not in the peat record. The warm period is usually called the Bølling oscillation, and sometimes the Windermere Warming as it was first discovered in lake deposits there.

18,000 to 15,000 years ago. - Ice. This is the Older Dryas period.
15000 to 12,800 years ago - Willow and Birch forest.
12,800 and 10,000 years ago - Ice. This is the Younger Dryas period.

There were Mesolithic human settlement in the British Islands throughout these three periods, and Britain would have been attached to the European mainland during these 'mini-ice-ages'. The two most recent glaciations (Dryas -15C)) is much less in the Southern hemisphere (-3C), and less pronounced in North America. The theory being that the North Atlantic drift, which warms Europe, had a pause.


Should we also introduce the Mammoth, Irish elk, British hyena and Wholly Rhinoceros back into Wales ? I'm sure I could get a grant from the Department of Rural Affairs for that.

[Yorick]

Scientist results are forever coming up with ideas about then and now. The fact is that most evergreen/coniferous woodland was planted for the timber. In other words 'farmed'.
The Woodland that would have grown naturally would be deciduous on the whole.
Coniferous trees give us squirrels and pigeons, the deciduous trees give us 1000's of species, needed for a healthy British habitat and fungus as well.
We 'farm' everywhere and very little land can be called 'wild' truly. As man, feels the need to control absolutely everything.
I think in time, if you cut down the majority of pines, you would see birch, hazel, beach, and oak and as I have seen happen, the influx of birds and insects, flowers, fungus and life.
Very little lives in a pinewood, it is too dark all of the year.

[Cotham Marble]

Originally Posted by Eryri

9999 years ago : No plants, just ice.
9700 years ago : Juniper forest.
9500 years ago : Birch forest.
9300 years ago : Hazel forest.
8500 years ago : Oak forest.
7750 years ago : Alder forest, some elm and pine.

5000 years ago : Significant impact of human activity begins.

4000 years ago : Shrubs. (Neolithic to Iron Age)
3000 years ago : Grass (Celtic)
2000 years ago : Mixed forest and sycamore. (Roman)
1500 years ago : Oak forest (Britannic)
1000 years ago : Heather explosion. (Norman)
600 years ago : Wheat and Barley.(Medieval)
500 years ago : Grass and Shrub. (Tudor)
100 years ago : Foreign pines. (Victorian - Industrial)

This sequence has no relationship whatever to the two studies quoted. The first of which gives plant cover as dating from 12,000 BP (10,000 BCE), while the second study doesn't even go back past 9,000 BP.

The Field Studies article gives Birch as the most important tree species at 10,000 BP with Oak and Pine displacing it from 8,500 BP, and then goes on to say "Apart from a few perturbations involving shifts in species dominance
and changes in altitudinal limits of certain species, it is essentially this woodland phase that has persisted right through to the present day." ! And this is a study of Snowdonia where glacial conditions will have continued far longer than virtually all of the rest of Wales.

The RCAHMW article provides a complex aboro-history, but one which may not be braodly extrapalatable outside the study area, and certainly is unlikely to have direct implications for southern Wales. There are other numerous 'confusions' in Eryri's sequence, among them the notion of a Norman heather explosion - the first thing to note is that the position of calluna in the study area is described as: The degradation of the upland soils, primarily from human activity but further exacerbated by changes in the climate, is apparent in this zone by the continuous, albeit low, presence of Calluna (heather). Such low-levels of Calluna are not typical of many other upland areas in Wales at this time, where heather-dominated moorland was common. In the Berwyn Mountains to the southwest of the Clwydians, the expansion of a grass heath progressively dominated by Calluna was dated to c.2900-2500BP (Bostock 1980). Similar Calluna-dominated landscapes are also noted from the Bronze Age at Cefn Ffordd (Chambers 1982), Gors Maen Llwyd, Brenig (Hibbert 1993), and Cefn Gwernffrwd (Chambers 1982), and from the Iron Age at Cefn Mawr, Hiraethog (Lascelles 1995). So any subsequent change in Calluna presence is a local phenomenon. Even then the refrence to 'explosion' concerns a date commencing as early as 1320 BP (690 CE/AD) nearly four centuries before the Normanisation of Wales.

This kind of confused presentation (if not gross misrepresentation) of the chronology of environmental change serves only to obfuscate any useful information about what approaches should be made in current land management.

CM

[Cotham Marble]

Originally Posted by Yorick

Scientist results are forever coming up with ideas about then and now.

And those results provide an increasingly consitent picture of what the past was like, the fact that new results are being achieved, doesn't undermine the value of earlier results

Originally Posted by Yorick

The fact is that most evergreen/coniferous woodland was planted for the timber. In other words 'farmed'. The Woodland that would have grown naturally would be deciduous on the whole.

What grew naturally was suited to th prevailing conditions - at varous times this included Juniper and Pine.

Originally Posted by Yorick

Coniferous trees give us squirrels and pigeons, the deciduous trees give us 1000's of species, needed for a healthy British habitat and fungus as well.

That is simply not true in every circumstance - the domination of Scots Pine does not mean that the Caledonian Forest is sterile. What distinguished the Caledonian Forest from farmed pine plantations is that the Forest contains many glades and ancient trees, while the plantations are densly planted and of uniform age.

Originally Posted by Yorick

We 'farm' everywhere and very little land can be called 'wild' truly. As man, feels the need to control absolutely everything.
I think in time, if you cut down the majority of pines, you would see birch, hazel, beach, and oak and as I have seen happen, the influx of birds and insects, flowers, fungus and life.

In southern Wales at least Ash will be a major pioneer and it will need to be managed if it is not to dominate the smaller and/or slower growing species. Over a three year period I estimated from ad hoc observation of a small grown out hazel coppice, that seedling success of Ash was 10+ times more successful than Oak and that Hazel had close to zero seedling success in proximaty of established Ash trees.

CM