Daragh Little and Siobhán McCarthy of VEON (pictured below) are attending the Society of Irish Foresters study tour in Trentino, northern Italy this week.
Today’s event is examining forest management planning in a municipality and Continuous Cover Forestry management in this beech woodland.
The event in Trentino brings together some of Europe’s foremost experts in Continuous Cover Forestry management to discuss and learn from each other through shared forest management experience.
The table below demonstrates how few trees reach a quality level of A5 -0.7%. D1 -10.2%. The orange and yellow shaded zones are forest areas targeted for improvement. Our Italian colleagues along with their Irish counterparts, are still learning about the best approaches to Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF).
Each tree in a stand is assessed based on the quality of the crowns and the quality of the stems. Good crowns indicate that the trees have good potential to put on growth. Good stems indicate timber quality. The objective is to achieve both good stems and timber quality in the same trees, but this is difficult to achieve so the trees are graded. The best trees are shown in the cell A5 and the worst are shown in cell D1. Then the target trees are favoured during thinning. Trees between the top grade and lowest grade are then managed to see if they can be improved over time.
Gap created by tree felling under Continuous Cover Forestry management regime allows light to reach the forest floor and creates the conditions for self-seeding of new trees.