Long-Term Study At 8 Sites Across UK Shows That Ancient Forests Are Failing To Regenerate

[hatrack]

EDIT

Today, in the dappled sunshine surrounding the largest trees, spaces that would normally be home to a mass of saplings scrambling for light are bare. This pattern is not limited to the 157-hectare (388-acre) site. From Buckholt Wood in Monmouthshire to Glen Tanar in the Cairngorms, new research across eight sites around the UK shows evidence of a deeply concerning trend: ancient woodlands are failing to regenerate.

Despite having vastly different species, soil types, rainfall and temperatures throughout the year, all the sites were following the same trend: the saplings were dying. Mailes, a postgraduate researcher and co-author of the research, says: “We could see as we were going through the forest that there wasn’t a lot of regeneration coming back up. I had the sad job of crossing off all the saplings that we couldn’t find or that we were finding dead.

“Across a lot of different species, they were just not coming back. It really made us think: there’s a problem here. Then we ran all the data and we could see that we were right,” she says. The study, which has not yet completed the peer-review process, found that sapling mortality rate increased by 90%,from 16.2% of saplings a year on average dying before 2000, increasing to 30.8% in 2022.

This means that an average sapling’s chance of survival after five years has fallen from 41.3% to just 15.8%. There was also a 46% drop in the number of small trees becoming established over the same period. At two sites – Denny Wood in the New Forest and Dendles Wood on Dartmoor – no saplings at all have survived since 1995 in the sites studied. The research is based on rare long-term monitoring of the same areas of ancient woodland since 1959, which allowed researchers to monitor changes over six decades. Its findings have sparked concern about the future resilience of Britain’s forests.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/10/britain-ancient-woodlands-failing-regenerate-forests-climate-drought-heat-disease-deer-hope-aoe