How wonderful it is to feel like a student again at the age of fifty. I had that experience this spring at a 'Forest lesson' by Simon Klingen in the Amerongse Bos. Klingen, retired forest manager for the Utrecht Landscape, and a kind of Big Friendly Giant, regularly takes a small group of people into the forest to teach them to look better.
His questions are always open-ended, the student's tentative answer is never wrong but at least 'fascinating,' and he stimulates the conversation within the group. In the many decades he has worked in the forest, multifunctional forest management has practically been invented, so those conversations cover every type of forest there is, from a rigid production forest to a site that has been deliberately left unmanaged for decades. They also touch upon the empirical fact that biodiversity generally benefits most from a management model somewhere between those two extremes, because a forest on sandy soil left to its own devices inevitably ends up as a monoculture of beeches, until another forest fire strikes. So, a day out in the greenery is very inspiring and educational. Klingen has already compiled his key experiences in the free-to-read booklet * Twaalf boslessen * (Twelve Forest Lessons ). Two lessons from our training day that I do not wish to withhold from you are what I call the quick nature quality check and the value in a tree trunk.
For Klingen there are three tools to quickly assess the natural quality of a piece of forest. First of all: is the forest mixed and does it contain the necessary native tree species? The latter are often better for native insects (and therefore also for birds) than exotic ones. Secondly: is there enough dead wood to be found? This is indispensable for large and small animal life, both standing and lying down. And thirdly: is there variation in the structure of the forest? Density, undergrowth, light: the simplest test for this is whether or not you always see something different when looking in the four cardinal directions. This way you quickly get a good impression of the status of nature quality, biodiversity, and everyone can do it.
To illustrate how a forester made his money, Klingen made a drawing in the sand of a cut tree trunk and divided it into five pieces of equal length. What is the distribution of the wood volume between those five pieces? It turns out that the bottom part already accounts for 40% of the wood volume, the second for 30%, the middle for 20% (some smart guy would have noticed that right away, after all a fifth part), the next to the top for 10% and in the upper part there is virtually no volume. That was a much more skewed distribution than we as laymen had guessed. When it comes to the value of the wood, this effect is even stronger: the bottom two-fifths of the trunk contain about 95% of the value, because wood for beautiful planks is simply worth much more than the thin wood used in wood. the top of the trunk is, you can't make anything beautiful out of it.
Forest is probably the most valued form of nature. And if nature were a sport, the forest would probably be the branch for which the Netherlands now has about 18 million national coaches. Blessed is the country that has enough people in the forest with expertise, and who, for example, know per forest type what happens when you harvest wood or leave it as dead wood in the forest. Forest management will always contain normative choices, but above all we need people who know what they are doing.
About the author
Marc Londo
Substantive Director NVDE
Marc Londo is substantive director of the NVDE, the Dutch Sustainable Energy Association. The NVDE represents ~1600 companies in the Netherlands that are jointly working towards 100% sustainable energy by 2050. Marc is responsible for the (scientific) substantiation of the NVDE's positions. He also works as a visiting researcher at the Copernicus Institute of Utrecht University. He previously worked at ECN (now TNO) on various studies to support energy policy. He has a PhD in biomass and land use and is a graduated environmental chemist.
