Trees, Forests and People (Dec 2022)
The changing perception of coppice with standards in German forestry literature up to the present day – From a universal solution to a defamed and overcome evil – and back?
Abstract
Today, coppice with standards are a highly valued object of nature conservation, even if they occupy a vanishingly small area of forests in Germany. The following paper aims to examine the nature conservation object ''coppice with standards'' with regard to its perception in German forestry and conservation literature from the 16th century until today. For this purpose, a corpus of approximately 500 forestry and nature conservation texts from German-speaking areas was examined, of which the most important tendencies are reproduced here. The coppice with standards silvicultural system can be regarded as a type of forest that has been demonstrably promoted by ruling authorities since the Middle Ages and was seen by forestry writers throughout the early modern period until the end of the 18th century as the solution to all economic problems. In the last third of the 18th century, however, more and more voices were raised, especially by cameralists and a few practical forestry writers, who advised against coppice with standards. Coppice with standards was relatively quickly written off as dead at the instigation of a few influential forestry writers and was thus irrecoverably lost in the long term from around 1830 onwards. From 1850 onwards it was increasingly seen as peasant, backward and old-fashioned type of forest management. A downright defamation campaign in which the coppice with standards system was portrayed as the root of numerous evils in the forest sealed its existence. Around 1900, apart from the methods for its conversion/abolition, it no longer played a role in forest science literature. It was not until the mid-1980s that coppice with standards and its advantages for biodiversity were discovered by German nature conservation, which at that time became increasingly geared to protecting species. Nevertheless, today in 2022 it seems that the trend of the reactivation of coppice with standards slowed down. They are not perceived as a realistic large-scale conservation option due to their problems related to today's economy and due to a stronger focus of forest nature conservation on process and deadwood conservation concepts. But perhaps not all hope is lost.
