empire of the undergrowth population level

Besides providing venison, commonly used for sport and prestige hunting by kings and aristocracy, they were an exclusive equivalent of modern “democratic” recreational forests. A very important woodland category was “deer parks”, vast, partly wooded, fenced areas sustaining dense game populations. Many ancient woodlands, such as Windsor in England or Le Bois de Boulogne in France have a very long history of recreational use. Most of the British woods, being integral parts of larger agricultural (agri-silvopastoral) landscapes, were either regularly grazed by livestock or managed as coppice woods (often with standards). Rackham emphasized that historic woodlands of Europe substantially differed from the contemporary woodlands-whether economically used or preserved in nature reserves. However, as the historical evidence shows, urban forests are not a recent invention. Thus, in contrast to most of the countryside forests, regulatory and cultural ecosystem services have been given much higher priority in metropolitan areas than the provision of forest commodities. Due to the specific characteristics of the urban environment (very high population density, pollution, noise, heat), urban forests are particularly expected to mitigate the environmental downsides of urban life. With the world-wide growth of urban population, there is an increasing interest of societies in urban forests.

Empire of the undergrowth population level