What Might a Sustainable Population of Trees in Wood-Pasture Sites Look Like?

Wood-pastures are important for their open-ground biodiversity and for the old trees they contain. However, younger trees to replace the current generation of old trees are often scarce, a potential threat to the future of the habitat mosaic and of species dependent on the trees. A simple model was used to illustrate how many younger trees might be expected under different assumptions of desired final density of old trees and rates of loss as trees age for an oak-dominated wood-pasture. From these the overall canopy cover of the landscape was estimated under an active pollarding regime and where the trees grow to full crown size. Canopy cover was often five times as great under full crown as under a pollarding regime; much of the canopy cover was in the younger (often missing) cohorts. The openness of current wood-pastures is in part a consequence of the absence of a sustainable tree population structure. Some protected sites may be too small to allow space for the missing generation of trees and at the same time retain current levels of openness. Analogies between current wood-pasture structures and ‘natural wood-pastures’ of the pre-Neolithic era must take account of the missing generations of trees.