Welcome! This blogspot gives you the chance to have your say as part of the 5 Year Review of the Sefton Coast Woodlands Forest Plan. To aid this process, please keep all discussion focused on the 5 Year Review. Any inappropriate or abusive posts will be removed.
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Pine trees are a source of food for the red squirrel, so the Partnership has been working to maintain the pine woodlands.
13.96 hectares of coupe felling (felling small areas to allow light in through the tree canopy to enable young trees to grow) was achieved across 11 ownerships. This is done to help achieve a healthy mixture of tree ages within the woodlands.
18.21 hectares (an area the size of 18 football pitches) was planted or regenerated naturally.
7,000m of fencing was installed in the woodlands to mark boundaries and protect the trees.
49.53 hectares were thinned at a mature stage to let light and air in bringing benefits of creating space and reducing disease.
15.05 hectares were thinned at an early stage to give young trees more space to grow.
Five landowners felled mature sycamore and white poplar within predominantly pine woodland to reduce undesirable species.
A question for you:
This work is about maintaining a healthy and dynamic woodland structure and all the owners have focused on achieving the key targets in this area. Do you feel that the balance between doing too much and doing too little is being maintained?
1 comments:
I think that the Forest Plan has done a good job of catching up with work that needed doing. But there needs to be reflection at the end of the first period to ask whether we want forest or plantation in the future. Some of the older plantations were hardly attractive and the woodland work has started to create structure -but still planting trees according to standard forestry practice. If in 50 years time we can still see these rows the woodland will continue to be plantation rather than forest.
I haven't seen much evidence of natural regeneration of pinewoods. Most of teh work seems to involve planting.
The other issue is in the choice of species. People have their preferences. We need to consider the balance between landscape (some look better), culture (Maritime Pine etc), food for Red Squirrel (Corsican?) and quality of wood (if we are going to use more of the timber). Is there a preference for different species in different areas or is it becoming a coastwide mix?
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