Stylised profile of a piece of southern woodland under traditional coppice management Plants The age that coppice panels are cut depends on the species and what the wood will be used for. The underwood storey can be dominated by one, or contain a mix of species such as hazel, alder, ash, crab apple, field maple, oak, goat willow, small-leaved lime, sweet chestnut and wych elm, beech and hornbeam. A coppice without standards was called a simple coppice. Each compartment would contain an ‘underwood’ which was coppiced, and scattered ‘standards’ or timber trees. Traditionally woods were divided into compartments, called a cant, coupe, panel, fell, sale, burrow or hagg depending on which part of the country the wood was in. Often the oldest trees in our woods are grown from coppice stools and pollarded trees (those cut above cattle and deer grazing height) – some are more than a 1,000 years old.
These stools can be coppiced indefinitely to provide a self-renewing source of wood. Regrowth can be very fast, often as much as two metres in a year. This produces numerous shoots or poles rather than one main stem. What is a coppice?Ī coppiced wood is cut periodically, with the trees allowed to regrow from the cut stumps, called stools. Derelict woodlands have little timber value – so the future is optimistic. The market for coppice products is growing – for high quality timber standards and also for traditional goods such as wattle hurdles and turned products. Woods that have not been coppiced tend to be of the same age and structure, supporting fewer species. Periodic cutting actually prolongs the life of the tree as well as creating a rich mosaic of habitats, attracting a wide range of flora and fauna. The AUC method generates a specific V-shaped time-signature, the vertex of which coincides with the thinning event and, as such, provides forest managers with another tool to assist decision making in the development of sustainable forest management strategies.Coppicing is a traditional form of woodland management that has shaped many of the remaining semi-natural woodlands in the UK. Metrics derived from the MCARI2 time-series also demonstrated the capacity of the canopy to recovery to pretreatment coverage levels. MCARI2 data from both L8 and S2 reflected how the influence of treatment on the canopy cover decreases over the years, providing significant differences in the thinning year and the year after. Soil-Line VIs were compared to the Normalized Vegetation Index ( NDVI) revealing that the Second Modified Chlorophyll Absorption Ratio Index ( MCARI2) more clearly demonstrated canopy evolution tendencies over time than the NDVI. Canopy development was computed by comparing the area under curves ( AUCs) of different VI time-series annually throughout the study period.
Time series data from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 were collected to calculate values for different VIs.
Plots were subjected to one of the following forest management treatments: Control with no intervention (2800–3300 stems ha −1), Treatment 1, one thinning leaving a living stock density of 900–600 stems ha −1 and Treatment 2, a more intensive thinning, leaving 400 stems ha −1.
For this, the changes produced at the canopy level by different thinning treatments and their evolution over time (2014–2019) were extracted from VI values corresponding to two trials involving 33 circular plots (r = 10 m). The aim was to identify optimal remote sensing Vegetation Indices (VIs) to use as time-sensitive indicators of the early response of vegetation after the thinning of sweet chestnut ( Castanea Sativa Mill.) coppice. A strategy to remotely monitor the development of the canopy after thinning using satellite imagery time-series data is presented. Understanding and assessing how forests react to these changes is key for forest managers to develop and follow sustainable practices. Forest management treatments often translate into changes in forest structure.