Thanks to the efforts of ‘citizen scientists’ across the country, the Ancient Tree Hunt has created a vast inventory of important trees. Here, the authors describe how it works, and what we can learn from it.
‘The man of science and of taste will…discover the beauties in a tree which others would condemn for its decay.’ Humphry Repton (1803)
When British Wildlife was first published, in the late 1980s, awareness of ancient and other veteran trees was limited to a very small number of people. Since then, knowledge of the richness of trees of special interest (ancient and other veteran, heritage, champion, notable, rare trees) in the UK landscape has developed in leaps and bounds, aided, in no small measure for the trees, by the internet and online databases linked to sophisticated mapping systems.