Huge replanting effort on Moors (From The Northern Echo)

Huge replanting effort on Moors

1:19pm Thursday 4th February 2010 in

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THE wind of change is blowing through the trees of the North York Moors.

The huge task of hand-planting nearly 400,000 trees in just four months has begun as the Forestry Commission’s annual re-planting scheme gets underway.

The new trees, covering 390 acres, will make-up for those harvested for timber, broaden wildlife habitats, - and also make good looses sustained during a stormy night in 2005.

During that tempest an estimated one million trees were either toppled or badly damaged across 1,000 acres of Forestry Commission land in North Yorkshire.

Replacing the trees lost is a gradual process as the terrain has to be left for a few years to allow the brash to die down.

However it means foresters can speed-up the transformation of local forests to become more natural looking places of greater value to animals and plants.

Forest management director Alan Eves said: "Many local woods were planted after the two world wars and in the 1960s when timber production was a priority. It was a very different world back then with war-time timber shortages still fresh in the memory in a nation with very low tree cover.

"But these days we take a much broader approach, with timber production being balanced with wildlife, recreation and landscape objectives. The buzz word is multi-purpose forestry, but I think the US Forest Service puts it rather better preferring the term land of many uses."

Most of the new planting this year will be in Langdale Forest, near Pickering; Ingleby Greenhow, near Stokesley; Gilling, near Helmsley; Sneaton, near Whitby and Harwood Dale, north of Scarborough.

*An experienced worker can plant up to 1,000 trees in a day. Crews work flat-out in all conditions except snow and ice, while keeping one eye on the calendar as saplings must be planted during the winter when their roots are fairly dormant.