Socio-Economic Demands, Ecological Conditions and the Power of Tradition: Past Woodland Management Decisions in a Central European Landscape

Humans have managed European landscapes, including woodlands, for millennia. Prior to the birth of modern forestry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there existed two basic management forms for lowland broadleaved woods: coppicing and wood pasture. While the existence and characteristics of these two basic management types are well-known, the reasons why particular woods were coppiced while others pastured are little investigated. As a case-study, we chose two large ancient woods in the southern Moravian region of Central Europe. One was managed as coppice, while the other as wood pasture for most of their histories. The woods are similar in size, location, climate and vegetation. We examined several potential explanations (terrain morphology, soil productivity, abundance of woodland, ownership and economy) for past management decisions in these woods. We found that the links between soil productivity, economic demands and ownership were of key importance. Other factors were less significant, for example woodland abundance played no detectable role in spite of the decreasing availability of woodland resources. We also found that tradition mattered; it took a major shift in ideology to change entire management strategies. In sum, management decisions were driven by a complex network of multiple interactions among the individual factors.