In Britain high forest results from the exploitation of trees for timber and wood.  This type of silviculture can be carried out using various techniques for cutting and harvesting the wood. There are three principal systems of felling which have quite different long-term effects on wildlife and biodiversity: the clear-cutting, shelterwood and selection systems.

In areas of limited extent, regeneration of the vegetation can take place spontaneously from neighbouring land, but in general it must be brought about through the planting of young trees from a nursery.

Because the soil is left bare by this system of cropping, there is risk of erosion in areas with high relief and of soil changes such as laterization in tropical regions, which rapidly prejudices any chances of regeneration. This is precisely what has happened, and both in mountainous and Equatorial regions the practice of clear-cutting has devastated huge forest areas whose productivity could have been maintained quite easily if more rational methods of management had been adopted.Modern forestry is also known as a high forest system of silviculture.

Even if clear-cutting does not induce erosion that is sufficiently catastrophic to prevent eventual regeneration, it does nevertheless profoundly disturb surface waterways. Streams and rivers through the forest are blocked with branches and become increasingly choked and silted up from the large amounts of fine soil carried into them by run-off at the time of heavy rain. Not only that, but the forest soils themselves lose large quantities of essential nutrients through increased lessivage and a higher rate of mineralization of organic matter. Thus, it is quite common to find after clear-cutting that surface waters in the area contain more than 10 p.p.m. of nitrates, a concentration that can lead to heavy eutrophication.

The shelterwood systemis practised in circumstances where there is a need to reduce competition between individual trees belonging to the same or to different dominant species. The idea is to encourage the growth of the best specimens and for this purpose harvesting is carried out on two or more occasions spaced out over several years. One cutting removes most of the young trees but leaves the more mature specimens to provide seeds for further seedlings and to provide shelter to enable the remaining young trees to become established. A second cutting then removes the mature trees at an appropriate time. This type of silviculture has also been used to regenerate forests where excessive exploitation to provide firewood has caused them to regress to mere coppices with low productivity.

High forest silviculture: Clear cutting with natural regeneration

Stainton Wood in Lincolnshire  is a rare example of a limewood managed as high forest - rare because lime is of little value as a timber tree and was nearly always coppiced or pollarded.

High forest silviculture: Clear cutting with planting

High forest siliviculture: the shelterwood system

High forest silviculture: the selection system

The so-called 'natural woodland' is the outcome of allowing the oldest groups of trees in an existing wood to develop with little or no interference. The resultant micro-wilderness areas are dominated a random patchiness provided by assemblages of old growth trees, and the masses of decaying wood from fallen trunks and boughs.

Hatton Wood (29ha) and Great West Wood (27ha), in Lincolnshire, are designated as 'minimum management areas', part of a series of ancient woods throughout Britain that have been set aside to study natural processes in woodland.

The management of wood pasture is difficult to assess on a national scale.  However, the records for the New Forest are particularly detailed, and as the last surviving example of the practice is is usually taken as a good indicator of the wood pasture management system when it was a vital part of the local economy. From these records it can be surmised that the practice was only part of a subsistence income of the average villager.

There were three main classes of persons who might exercise rights of wood pasture over the New Forest in the seventeenth century: the Lords of the manors laying in or adjacent to the Forest, each with his Park or Manor Farm and one or two moderate sized farms out on lease; the very numerous tenants and copyholders of the manors, each with his cottage and piece of ground, or with a holding of a few acres; and a class of freeholders —frequently assuming the title of Yeoman in the claims—with holdings not usually exceeding fifty acres and more often of between fifteen and thirty acres, with many less than fifteen acres. This last class accounted for the largest number of claims, although they were a minority of the total number of holdings.

It is clear that communal manorial organisations of open fields had long been replaced by holdings managed in severalty. Clearly, too, the majority of the holdings were too small in themselves to be self- supporting. From this and from the nature of the claims registered in 1670, it can be deduced that the economy was mainly one of stock- keeping based on the use of the common lands. The judicious exercise of rights of grazing and mast, supplemented by those of turbary, estovers and marl, the cutting of bracken for bedding and litter and gorse for fuel and fodder, enabled the small their calf ... in the spring they may be sold with calf at side for £10 to £14 each.'

The following passage cites the accounts of an exceptional smallholder who kept them, and to a short summarising passage:

The stock kept on this holding were three cows, a heifer and a weanling calf; twenty-four pigs were bought in for the pannage season and subsequently sold. The accounts include the labour bill for all rough work, haymaking and cleaning and emptying the pen and styes. The profits 'on the cow kind—made by the sale of butter, new milk at 4d per quart, skim-milk (to oblige) at Id a quart—amounted to £39 18s 6d.' The profits on the pigs amounted to £21 13s 3d, making a net profit of £61 13s 3d. He adds that the maximum profit made by this holding in any year was £77 5s lid, and the minimum, £59. It will be noted that there is no reference to ponies. Eyre sums up as follows:

Jebb, writing in te 1890s, gives a similar, but less detailed picture, although he enlarges on the most economical size for a Forest holding. 'Ordinary cottage holdings' he says 'average about six acres. On these the men earn extra wages by carting, etc.' Twelve acres were locally considered to be sufficient for an entire living. 'Many Forest men consider this the maximum size that can be profitably worked' without hired help. 'The size of Forest holdings is important . . . there is a certain acreage which is specially adapted to the local requirements . . . regulated by the amount of stock the wife and family can manage while the husband is out at work' in the case of cottage-holdings, and 'the amount of land a man can cultivate himself with his family without hired help' in that of the smallholdings proper. The average smallholding he describes as 'mostly pasture, for hay', with a strip or so devoted to roots, cabbage or potatoes. On larger holdings—ie of twenty acres or more—about one-quarter would normally be down to arable. The chief feature of Forest holdings, however, was the large head of stock which the use of the commons allowed to be maintained. He gives an example of a holding of twenty acres, 'typical of many others' which maintained seven milch cows, four heifers and three yearlings, one horse and four brood sows. Four acres were down to roots and oats and the rest to hay.

Fluctuations in the numbers of commonable animals depastured on the Forest are likely to be related mainly to movements in livestock product prices. A study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century material confirms that the commoners as a body do react positively to price movements, that is, increase the head of stock on the Forest as product prices rise, and reduce it as they fall.

Medieval and seventeenth-century silviculture in England consisted of enclosing a site which contained mother trees and relying on natural regeneration, supplemented if necessary by sowing, for a crop. The plans accompanying a survey of 'coppices', as the enclosures were known, in the New Forest in 1609, made by John Norden, shows three methods of enclosure: a fence surmounting a bank with an outside ditch; a fence alone, apparently of pales; and a quickset hedge alone. Only the first method seems to have been entirely effective in excluding the deer. Since the area occupied by a group of mother trees rarely conformed to a regular pattern the shapes of the coppices were themselves irregular and wherever their banks and ditches are traceable on the ground today their alignment is in complete contrast to the rigid boundaries of the present day statutory Inclosures.

Under the Forest Law as it was understood by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Crown, as well as others, was precluded from making enclosures, at any rate of a permanent nature. By definition, however, encoppicement in Forests was a process both of enclosure and of throwing open again after a specific interval of years, during which the crop became established and beyond the reach of stock and deer. The Act of 22. Edward IV, c 5-7, 1483, recited the enclosure of land in Royal Forests for a period of three years as accepted practice and extended the period to seven years. The management of the Crown woodlands was put on a systematic basis in the Act of 33. Henry VIII, c 39, 1542, which provided for the appointment of a Surveyor or Master of the King's Woods. The King's Surveyor was to 'cause to be surveyed ... all the wood and underwood ... in the King's Forests, Chaces . . . (etc) and shall have full power... to make sale or sales thereof... forsying always that the said wood shall be fenced from time to time as need be reqyre for the increase thereof.' The profits from the woods were to be paid into the Treasury and the Surveyor was to render annual accounts.

The Statute of Woods, 35. Henry VIII, c 17, 1544, went much further and laid down what amounted to a working plan for coppice management in Forests. It provided that in coppices cleared at or under twenty-four years' growth, twelve standards were to be left to every acre, each of which must be of twelve inch diameter at three feet from the ground before they could be felled. If over twenty-four years' growth, twelve standards were to be left to every acre, to remain for at least twenty years before they could be felled. Coppices in which underwood of fourteen years' growth or less had been cleared were to be enclosed for four years after clearing; if over fourteen years' growth but under twenty-four years', they were to be enclosed for six years after clearing; and if cleared after twenty-four years' growth they were to be enclosed for seven years. A further Act of 1588 extended the period during which coppices could be enclosed in Forests to one of nine years.

Woodlands in Forests were the responsibility of a specific Forest officer, known in the New Forest by the fifteenth century as the Woodward. It was the practice, however, to lease the underwood in coppices to a tenant, the Crown reserving all rights to the timber trees. The lease of Catshill, Brodstone and South Bentley coppices in the New Forest to Augustine Hill in 1595 demonstrates the system. The three coppices, totalling 110 acres, were leased in consideration of the sum of £9 5s 4d and an annual rent of £5, all 'great trees' and 'trees fit for timber' being reserved to the Crown. The lessee was to make not more than two cuttings of the underwood during his tenancy and after each cutting was to enclose the coppices with 'ditches and hedges' and ensure that neither deer nor stock entered them, for the period required by the law. Coppices were thus managed on a system similar to that later known as 'coppice-with- standards', the standards being claimed by the owner whilst the coppice was cut by a tenant. The owner—in theory—benefited in two ways: it received a rent for the underwood; and protection for the timber crop. The crop which the lessee might realise included hazel, holly, thorn, alder, willow and defective timber trees, the first two species being those most often mentioned in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents relating to coppices. Pollarding, though generally prohibited in leases, was clearly regular practice and references to 'lop-able' oaks suggest that it may sometimes have been accepted as such.

Whilst it is by no means easy to prove, it is probable that most woodland has been subject to periodic encoppicement during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: certainly the profusion of coppice banks traceable in surviving woods today suggests that this was so, though many may pre-date the fifteenth century.

Pollards are trees cut about 8ft from ground level which respond by producing a thick annual harvest of branches for faggots, and winter fodder.  Burnham Beeches  has about 700 individual pollarded beech trees which were lopped regularly between about 1500 and 1820.

Management of these veteran trees is a problem.  Some species such as willow, hornbeam and lime respond well to repollarding but the response of oak is not so predictable.

Pollarding does not seem to have been a regular practice in forests, where it was associated with wood pasture- a way of avoiding grazing pressure on regenerating ground coppice.  In fact there was a law against it in the New Forest.  It was however common for hedgerow oak, ash and hornbeam, the distribution of the management system being very much part of local village customs.

Woodland glades and rides are really grassland habitats where regular grazing or cutting keeps scrub at bay. Such areas can maintain a large number of light demanding flowering plants that can support a high diversity of nectar gathering insects. The ridess function both as a refuge and a corridor for colonisation.  Management prescriptions recommend differences in cutting frequency to maintain a range of habitats from open canopy grassland to closed canopy coppice.  The three factors that determine the biodiversity of a ride are its width, the height of the trees at its edges and its orientation to the sun. 

Scrub wants to be woodland and the management of scrub is aimed at maintaining a dynamic spectrum from pioneer saplings to closed dense canopy of hawthorn and suckering blackthorn bushes.  In this context a field neglected for a few years offers an opportunity to establish a scrub management system that will maintain an arrested succession with a high bird/invertebrate diversity. The aim is to produce a fine scale patchiness with grassy places.  Cutting scrub will soon turn it into coppice so the ideal prescription consists of a combination of selective cutting and grubbing, with grazing by large herbivores, such as cattle.

A water course through or around a wood is a managent device in its own right, to prevent waterlogging of the standing trees.  Drainage features are also habitats that require light to maintain a high aquatic productivity.  This means that water course should be integrated into the management plan as a wildlife feature, treating it as a ride by establishing a tree/scrub-free zone on either side.