 standing_in_an_ancient_tree Image from the Guardian
Who knows if the British were the first treehuggers but they certainly have a lot of them:
there are over 100,000 ancient trees in the country. Seventy percent of all of the oldest
trees in Europe are in the UK, and many of them are in trouble.
The Ancient Tree Hunt is a five-year project led by the Woodland Trust, which is recording
every ancient tree in Britain. So far they have logged 38,000 ancient trees through the
work of ecologists and ordinary members of the public.
 Another ancient tree
Image from ancient tree hunt
Ancient trees are defined as those that are unusually old for its species. So an oak tree
that is 600 years old is classified as ancient and a beech that is over 300 years old is
also called ancient. Birches, even more short lived, are old at two centuries.
 hugging a tree Image from worldofstock.com
Of special interest (!) to readers of this blog is the informal measurement used. It's called "hugs".
"A hug is based on the finger tip to finger tip measurement of an adult, which is about 1.5m.
This distance is usually almost the same as your height, and means you can measure a tree
even if you forget your tape measure! The trees below might be ancient if they measured the following:
Oak - 3 adult hugs
Beech - 2 adult hugs
Scots Pine- 1 adult hug
Rowan - one adult hug
Birch - a wrist hugmeasure"
These trees are ecological treasures that have a history and presence; they are a part of our heritage.
They also serve important functions in the ecology of the forest--providing special habitats for rare
plants, insects, birds and mammals.
Three-quarters of the UK's 17 species of bat are known to roost in them. Some plant species can only
survive on ancient trees; certain rare lichens only grow on their bark.
But they are endangered and once they are gone, they are gone. Farmers plough too close to them,
or use fertilisers and pesticides that affect them, animals graze too intensively, or their defecations
poison the trees, footpaths can compress the roots, and trees are knocked down.
 The Darley Oak Image from webshots news: The Darley Oak
The Woodland Trust is asking the public to discover and record the thousands of ancient trees scattered
across the countryside. They want to develop a comprehensive map of the trees so that they can monitor
threats to them and plan how to best conserve them. The goal of the project is to record at least 100,000
ancient trees throughout the UK by 2011.
This article has been extracted from treehugger.com
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