Examination of Witnesses (Questions 217
- 219)
TUESDAY 23 MAY 2000
MR RICHARD
SMITHERS AND
MS HILARY
ALLISON
Chairman
217. Welcome to the Committee for the last session
this morning. Can I ask you to introduce yourselves for the record
please?
(Ms Allison) Certainly, Chairman. My name is Hilary
Allison, I am the Policy Director for the Woodland Trust.
(Mr Smithers) I am Richard Smithers and
I am the Woodland Trust's UK Conservation Adviser.
218. Thank you very much. Do you want to say
a few words by way of introduction or are you happy for us to
go straight into questions?
(Ms Allison) We are quite happy for the questions
to start straight away.
Mr Olner
219. Could I ask why you feel habitat recovery
is so important?
(Mr Smithers) There are two aspects really to habitat
recovery, habitat restoration and habitat creation. By way of
example I will use ancient woodland. In terms of habitat restoration,
ancient woodland is a finite, irreplaceable resource, it covers
less than 2 per cent of the UK land area yet since 1930 some 38
per cent of our ancient woods in England and Wales have actually
been converted to plantations, many of them with conifer. Those
planted ancient woodland sites actually still do retain some of
the key features of ancient woodland, much degraded, in steep
decline, but still with a potential for restoration, and we feel
it is very important that those sites are restored because it
is the only way of actually increasing the area of ancient semi-natural
woodland.
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