Conservation Officer Patrick Cook explains how sustainable forestry can help butterflies and moths.
Sustainability is becoming increasingly important, both in our day to day lives, such as the use of plastic, and the way we use land such as for agriculture and forestry. Forestry is a major land use across Europe, providing timber and products such as paper. Over the last century forestry, particularly in the UK, has been intensive with little consideration for the social and ecological consequences of such practices. We are probably all familiar with so called clear fell practices, where large areas of trees are all felled simultaneously.
Within the UK and Europe there has been a growing interest in more sustainable forestry that considers wildlife, ecosystem services and social aspects such as recreational opportunities. One such example is continuous cover forestry. This method selects individual trees for felling, making the process more sustainable, whilst creating a diverse woodland structure. There is therefore considerable opportunity to increase the populations of widespread species of butterflies and moths. Butterfly Conservation is currently running a project investigating how continuous cover forestry delivers for biodiversity at the Stourhead Western Estate in Southern England. So far this has involved butterfly and moth trapping in the woodland, whereby this year we recorded a total of 13,000 individual moths. The habitat created has shown to provide for widespread species such as the Silver-washed Fritillary and Black Arches which are noticeably more common in areas managed under continuous cover forestry.
Our involvement with this project led to an exciting opportunity to attend a sustainable forestry workshop in Estonia, with delegates attending from around Europe. The workshop provided an opportunity to discuss the economics, social and ecological aspects of forestry at a local and European scale. I presented our findings from Stourhead at the workshop and learnt about several projects concerning continuous cover forestry in Estonia. As a conservationist sharing these experiences and working together across country boundaries is really valuable and can only help the work we do on protecting and researching butterflies, moths and wider biodiversity in forestry.
Patrick Cook
Conservation Officer
Follow Patrick on twitter - @PatrickCookBC