The End of Common Uses and Traditional Management in a Central European Wood

Abstract

Common uses and traditional management were once important elements of woodland management in Central Europe (Johann et al. 2011). Among them, we can list for example pasturing, haymaking, coppicing, pannage, bee-keeping and wild fruit collecting. At different times and for different reasons, by the second half of the twentieth century virtually all of these uses disappeared. In this chapter, I examine a lowland woodland in the Czech Republic to illustrate some of the issues connected to this long process.