Introduction

This chapter presents a range of information about the woodland environment, mostly using sources that are outside the scope of National Statistics. They are included to provide additional context to the topic.

Estimates for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are included, where possible, in addition to UK or GB totals. Further information on the data sources and methodology used to compile the figures is provided in the Sources chapter.

All of the statistics presented in this chapter have been previously released.

The statistics on the populations of wild birds (Table 5.1 and Figure 5.1) and woodland fires (Tables 5.2a and 5.2b) have been revised since “Forestry Statistics 2017”. For further details on revisions, see the Environment section of the Sources chapter.

A copy of all environment tables is available to download as an Excel spreadsheet from https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statistics/data-downloads/.

Key findings

The main findings are:

• The UK woodland bird index has remained relatively stable since the early 1990s, following a period of long term decline.  Most of this decline has occurred in woodland specialist species.
• There were around 4,200 woodland fires in Great Britain in 2016-17, covering an area of around 800 hectares.

Additional resources

Sources chapter: Environment