It is believed that the Council plan to apply for another licence to fell yet more trees. If you have any further information regarding this please email the Your Comments page
Quote from Sheffield Council:
"it is against policy to cut down healthy trees"
Sheffield Gazette Thurs March 25th, page 4.
There has been an article published about the Commons by an independent investigator. You can read it at
http://www.self-willed-land.org.uk/articles/loxley-wadsley.htm
It is quite long and complex but well worth reading. Here are a few extracts to whet your appetite:
I suspect
that the LNR declaration listed the landscape cover at that time, of grassland,
heath, scrub and woodland. Provided with this information, English Nature (as
it was then) had the opportunity to give the heathland element at Loxley and
Wadsley Commons the far greater protection of a statutory SSSI designation, but
they must not have deemed it to be of significant value, instead just accepting
the voluntary declaration of an LNR.
…. it is
surprising how many advocates for the destructive management at Loxley and
Wadsley Commons that I have come across seem to invoke some pseudo SSSI status
or even a pseudo SAC or SPA status (European designations) to defend it.
The
management plan shows every sign of being the product of a perfunctory process
that ticks boxes by picking off-the-shelf prescriptions from the conservation
professional’s handbook. Would it be anything different since the main authors
were respectively a Forest Ranger in PWCS and an ecologist with the Sheffield
Ecology Unit, the latter drawing up the management options after the initial
public meeting, but which were never subsequently publicly consulted upon?
If you are squeamish about tree persecution, then don’t
read the following variety of prescriptions in the management plan for
achieving the birch clearance:
”by felling and poisoning; by up-rooting; by ring-barking; by wounding and
infection with birch polypore fungus. English Nature recommends ring-barking
trees and allowing them to die gradually”
You may also find bizarre the prescription for oaks in the
more mature woodland area of the LNR (and see later):
”Encourage some of the non-veteran oaks to develop veteran characteristics.
Techniques include pollarding, breaking branches and making holes to initiate
rot”
…. the
HAP (Habitat Action Plan) notes that in the Sheffield LBAP area most of the
heathland is intermediate, with little lowland heath and no upland heath…. The
HAP implies that the heath at Loxley and Wadsley Commons is intermediate, the
description of heath in the North Area Action Plan for Loxley and Wadsley
Commons has it as intermediate (see earlier), and the Forestry Commission in
questioning by the Friends over the felling licence for the LNR consider it as
intermediate as well. So why does the management plan call it lowland heath?
How can you justify a management aim based on scarcity of lowland heath, when
the heath in question is intermediate?
I would
thus utterly refute the following stricture in the management plan for Loxley
and Wadsley Commons since it seems more appropriate for a council allotment
than for a natural space ”If we do not manage the Commons our generation
will have failed to pass on the Commons in the condition it was passed to us”