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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Activities:
0.59 hectares was cleared of white poplar for regeneration with broadleaf.
0.95 hectares was thinned at St Lukes Church to improve light penetration for wildflowers and some underplanting.
0.74 hectares was replanted with broadleaves.
About 2.01 hectares was coppiced to generate vigorous regrowth in alder, willow and birch woodland.
A question for you:
The concern has been to limit the large-seeded broadleaves within the woodland area (to try to prevent grey squirrel incursion) and to maintain the overall broadleaf content to 10% of the species mixture, reducing invasive species such as poplar and sycamore. A more detailed analysis of species content has recently revealed that broadleaf content has crept up over the years to 20% or more – do you feel that we are being robust enough in trying to keep to this target?
1 comments:
I think this is a difficult question. We are being driven towards pine species, not so much by the needs of Red Squirels but by the desire to reduce broadleaf corridors for Grey incursion and to have less food supply which may give Grey Squirrels a competitive edge. So, in an ideal world what would we want for the woodlands of the Sefton Coast?
Everywhere I look I see broadleaf self-sown trees doing well, including oak, holly, birch whilst pine trees are cosseted in their tubes. We know that left to nature it would be the broadleaves that would dominate -reinforcing in a sense the artificial nature of the pine woods. The experiment at the National Nature Reserve shows that we could easily have much more oakwood on the coast. This is potentially what the dune woodland should look like and it has the advantage that oak woodland does not affect the watertable to the same extent as pine woodland. Were it not for the issue of Grey Squirrel we could be encouraging a lot more deciduous woodland , e.g. 60% pine, 40% deciduous.
The PR problem may come when a huge effort has to be made to try to keep broadleaf woodland to 10-20%. People may ask is it worth it? I do, however, support the current effort to reduce considerably teh amount of white poplar on the coast.
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