#593 What is the difference between a forest, a wood, and a copse?

What is the difference between a forest, a wood, and a copse? These days, the difference is in the size, but it wasn’t always that way. Let’s look at all three of them.

What is a copse? These days a copse is defined as a small group of trees. There is no defined size or number of trees. The word “copse” comes from the 1570s and it was a contraction of the word “coppice”. A coppice was a small wood grown for the purposes of cutting. It was a small area where trees were grown specifically to be cut down and used. Farmers didn’t want to damage the woods, but they needed wood, so they harvested it. The practice of coppicing is a sustainable forestry technique that is still in use today. Trees are cut down very close to their stump and the wood is used. The tree puts out a new shoot from the stump and grows again. After a few years, the tree can be harvested. The procedure can be repeated indefinitely. The trees don’t die of old age because they are constantly being reborn. Farmers usually divide the copse up into sections so that they always have a section to be harvested and a section that is growing.

What is a wood? This is a surprisingly difficult question as there isn’t a single definition and it varies from country to country. It tends to come down to the density of the trees and the thickness of the canopy cover. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization defines a wood as anything smaller than 0.5 hectares with trees smaller than 5 meters and a canopy cover of less than 10%. This is a good definition, but there are many different definitions. Why is it called a wood? The word “wood” used to mean “tree” or a collection of trees.

So, what is a forest? Going by the Food and Agricultural Organization’s definition, it is any collection of trees over 0.5 hectares, with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10%. However, that wasn’t always the definition of a forest. In the 9^th century AD, a forest was an area of land reserved as the king’s royal hunting grounds. The word was introduced by the Normans who took over Britain after William the Conqueror. They used the word forest to refer to an uncultivated area set aside for hunting by the royal family. This legal term was even written in the Magna Carta. Because it was just an area for hunting, a forest didn’t even need to have any trees. Any open space used for hunting could be a forest. However, the animals that were hunted usually did live in large, wooded areas and over the years, the word became associated with a large wood. By the start of the 14^th century, the word was still used to refer to the king’s reserved hunting ground, but it was also used to refer to a large, wooded area, and that is the meaning that slowly took over.

The number of forests we have in the world and the number of trees are shrinking year by year. 10,000 years ago, 57% of the habitable world was covered by forests. That works out to be about 6 billion hectares. The rest was wild grassland and shrubs. Today, only 38% of the world is covered by forests and 14% is covered with wild grassland and shrubs. The rest is grazing land (31%), crops (15%), and our cities (1%). That doesn’t seem like we have lost a huge amount of forest, but it is the timescale in which it has happened that is alarming. 10,000 years ago, there was 57% forest. 5,000 years ago, there was 55% forest. 300 years ago, there was 52% forest. And now there is 38%. We have lost the majority of the forest in the last 300 years, or basically since around the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Fortunately, the rate of deforestation has declined recently. We are still cutting down trees, but the rate has slowed a little. The main reason for this is that we are able to grow far more crops in far less space than people used to be able to. If we can work out a way of producing meat in a lab and cutting the number of cows that graze on cleared forest land, perhaps the problem will improve even more. What with the state of the climate, we need to hang on to every tree that we can. And this is what I learned today.

Photo by Tobias Aeppli: https://www.pexels.com/photo/trees-1125265/

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