A remarkable study of maps from Essex and Suffolk plotted more than 170 years ago has revealed how 600,000 British ash, oak and elm trees have vanished since the onset of modern farming.
Volunteers enlisted by the Woodland Trust studied the mid-19th century Ordnance Survey maps and digitised the locations of more than 100,000 trees standing outside of woodland in the Eastern Claylands.
These were then compared to recent aerial images from the 5,000 sq km landscape, with researchers finding only 51 per cent of the 1.2 million trees mapped in small groups or alone on fields and boundaries had survived to the present day.
Around 84 per cent of scattered field trees had been felled or died, and more than half of oak, four quarters wooden paintings elm and ash trees standing on boundaries had vanished since the 19th century.
Researchers noted that the disappearance of more than half of these trees suggests this trend ‘is likely replicated in other UK landscapes, living room wooden paintings particularly those with similar histories of agricultural intensification.’
Volunteers enlisted by the Woodland Trust studied mid-19th century Ordnance Survey maps (left) and digitised the locations of more than 100,000 trees in the Eastern Claylands of Essex and Suffolk (right, circled are the trees lost)
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Researchers noted that the disappearance of more than half of these trees suggests this trend ‘is likely replicated in other UK landscapes, particularly those with similar histories of agricultural intensification.’ Pictured: The 1850 Ordnance Survey map
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