Managing Wooded Pavement

Recognizing Wooded Pavement

Wooded pavement has a closed canopy of trees and shrubs. Views tend to be restricted by a dense cover of trees. Clints are cloaked with dense, green mosses.

Clearings or glades with bare clints may occur. In the absence of browsing stock, the lower branches of yews and junipers clothe the clints with a broad skirt of foliage. Whilst not open to grazing by domestic stock, wooded pavements may nevertheless be grazed or browsed by deer. Wooded pavement usually grades into woodland, scrub or limestone grassland.

Features of a well-managed wooded pavement

• open glades and woodland edges to encourage butterflies and other invertebrates,
• clearings created by thinning or rotational coppicing,
• a diversity in the age and type of trees giving a variety in vegetation height and structure,
• wild flowers and ferns setting seed and flourishing,
• transitions from pavement vegetation to other valuable habitats such as scrub, woodland, heath and species-rich grassland,
• yew groves, juniper scrub and hazel coppice,
• areas of mossy clints, important for invertebrates.

How to manage wooded pavements

• Where currently practiced, coppice or woodland management should be maintained and should be reintroduced where it has lapsed. The introduction of coppicing to sites where it was not previously practiced may improve the nature conservation value of wooded pavement. Maintaining areas of high forest within a site will provide diversity.
• Where pavements are managed as high forest, heavy thinning and selective felling should be used in rotation to open up the canopy and create glades. Where present, rides should be maintained or widened. Coppice coups, rides and clearings will also help develop transitions to other habitats.
• Juniper and yew should be maintained, and not felled or coppiced.
• Non-native conifers, beech and self-sown sycamore should be removed from pavements because they have an adverse effect on the underlying flora through shading, acidification and smothering, resulting from needle or leaf fall.
• Deer control and fencing of coppice regrowth may be required on some wooded pavements, particularly where they are managed as coppice.