Two years without new tree planting grants in England!

 reblogged from The Woodland Trust blog, who also have a campaign called

Love it or Lose it addressing issues around native woodlands.

What’s happening with Ash Dieback in Ashwellthorpe

Some of the research and discussion linked below relate to why we are not yet extracting wood that has been coppiced or felled in Ashwellthorpe Lower Wood.

You can see that most of the discussion is about monitoring, but no attempts to determine the effectiveness of preventative measures have been proposed, which would require sites with some measures taken to be compared with other sites with different or no measures. The Chalara fraxinea fungus is one of many pathogenic organisms in our UK trees of recent years, and they all have had armies of researchers documenting their destructive effects. As with most ecological disasters, recognition of the problem is followed by years of learning to identify and monitor it, and in some cases remedies are too late, but lessons are learnt. For example, in 1971 our elms were decimated by a fungus spread by a beetle and even after 42 years control is by annually pruning and spraying growing trees, and as elms are not mature until 60 years old, we cannot claim to have any mature resistant cultivars. There is opposition to the introduction of a GM cultivar which has been made.

Where is Ash Dieback this week 4th February 2013

 

The Forestry Commission notices around Ashwellthorpe

 

“Remember the disease does not spread via spores from the fungus during the winter so we have the time to carefully examine each report. It is our priority to destroy recently planted trees but mature trees with the disease do not need to be felled.”

Defra “action plan”

Chalara fraxinea – Ash Dieback – John Innes Research link below

 

20130104 Ashwellthorpe

20130104 First post to this blog, which is a sand-box for website design experiments.

Here’s what we did last Friday –

Coppicing at Ashwellthorpe Lower Wood