Deadwood - Origin, Meaning and Promotion

Deadwood: A hotbed of life (Part 1)
Deadwood includes dead trees. There is standing deadwood, in which the tree is not removed and lying deadwood, which lies on the ground and rots. In a primeval forest of Europe, up to 30% of the wood is dead trees, in a commercial forest usually only one tenth of it. The removal destroys valuable habitats for the entire food chain.

contents

• Life in the dead
• Bees and wasps
• Bark, crownwood, tree mulch
• Spruce and oak stands
• Threatened specialists
• Food for others
• Amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals
• mushrooms
• The microclimate
• Deadwood in rivers and streams
• "Clean up" and destroy biodiversity
• "Remove pests"
• The deadwood strategy
• Gardener against the "ugliness"
• Ordnungshahn and garbage disposal
• What to do?
• Use deadwood - do not throw it away
• A Benjes hedge
• A wild hedge
• A growth process
• Plants for the Benjes hedge
• tendrils
• shrubbery
• wild perennials
• An animal paradise
• What do you have to pay attention to?
• How are you??

Life in the dead

Deadwood provides the basis for a variety of organisms, most of which depend on a particular phase of decay and a particular type of wood. These include, in particular, the 1350 beetles and several hundred large mushrooms that live on dead trees until it has become completely mineral. These species are interdependent: insects infect the wood with fungal spores, other insects eat the mushrooms, let their larvae grow inside or live in it themselves.

Deadwood forms the basis of life for a variety of animal and plant species. (Image: lights4u / fotolia.com)

Bees and wasps

For example, most of the approximately 1,000 German bee and wasp species depend on deadwood as a basis of life. In the holes, cracks and gullies, which develop at the decay, they build their nests, grow their larvae here, where wasps catch insects from which they feed. Wild bees, wasps and hornets prefer upright and dead tree stumps.

In addition to the insects that eat the wood, other insects settle as second settlers, in the caves and corridors that create the wood eaters.

Bark, crownwood, tree mulch

There are not only a variety of species in the dead wood, but diverse communities of flora and fauna: bark, crown wood, tree mulch, tree hollows fire areas, lying or standing deadwood and further such of beech, pine etc. These are all own habitats with specialized animals and Plants. Yes, after exposure to light, humidity, fungal and insect infestation, wood volume and degree of decomposition, there are certain species.

Spruce and oak stands

For example, the beetles named Spruceboks live only on softwood, the disc blocks on dried softwood, the rams on hardwood. One of them, the Alpine goat, inhabits only mushroomed beech wood. Names like oakbuck already refer to the appropriate food. Fire beetles in turn live under the bark of dry deadwood, their larvae hunt bark beetles, which are also dependent on wood.

Threatened specialists

Wood ants build their nests in hollow tree trunks, ants live in dead coniferous and hardwood. No wonder that many of these species are endangered today: black woodpeckers like wrynecks, stag beetles, whose larvae live on the roots of rotten oaks, elms and fruit trees, the wood bees, gnaw the corridors in the wood or inhabit the beetles.

The same applies to giant wood gulls, which lay their eggs in the wood and inoculate with mushroom spores, or the giant wasp, which deposits their eggs in the larvae of the wood wasp.

Every fourth beetle species in Germany lives on deadwood, and the proportion of wood-eating beetles in the extremely endangered beetle species is high.

Every fourth beetle species in this country relies on deadwood as a habitat and food source. (Image: dieter76 / fotolia.com)

Food for others

Small invertebrates provide the livelihood for amphibians, reptiles, fish and small mammals. These include mosquitoes, hairy barbs and midges, whose larvae develop in woody fashion. This is also true for Tummelfliegen whose larvae eat tree fungi, wood flies hunt larvae and worms.

Amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals

Vertebrates build nests in deadwood and find their food here. Especially woodpeckers specialize in insect larvae that live in it. Their brood caves hammer them into rotten wood, not always in dead - and this, if it is upright, ideal for woodpecker caves. The three-toed woodpecker builds its nests in corrugated trunks, gray and green woodpecker put their caves in sick and dead wood at different heights.

The woodpeckers of the woodpeckers, in turn, use other species such as woodchuck, sparrow and tawny owl, pigeon, squirrel, ragwort, pine marten, Bechstein bat, fringed bat, water bat or large noctule.

Lying deadwood is a habitat for pond, mountain, thread and ridge newts, fire salamanders, common toads, forest and sand lizards, stalking, otters, striped and snake snakes. In waters, it provides habitat for the nearly extinct European pond turtle, which likes to sunbathe on tree trunks lying in the water.

mushrooms

Fungi (and bacteria) decompose dead wood, and this process forms the basis for complex communities. Zunderschwamm or Hallimasch nourish it and produce the humus, which in turn is the basis for the growth of various plants, especially for seedlings of trees. Dead trees regenerate the forest.

The dead wood is decomposed by fungi for years. (Image: Kalle Kolodziej / fotolia.com)

The microclimate

If the dead wood lies on the ground, then a special microclimate is created. Wood conducts little heat and has a dark surface. Therefore, the temperature stays warmer than the air when the air cools in the winter. In addition, the wood protects against overheating and dehydration in summer.

For this reason, it is an important habitat for amphibians such as fire salamanders, all newt species and common toads whose skin needs moisture, and which does not tolerate extreme heat.

Deadwood in rivers and streams

The big rivers in Germany are for the most part straightened. Without this clearcut on the river bank, deadwood is inseparable from the river landscape and even determines the flow speed and water level: trunks in the water slow down the flow, alluvial material remains hanging from the wood, and islands form.

Dead wood slows the erosion of the shores, sediments are deposited on it, which prevents the river from being buried. Due to the traffic jam, the water rushes to the sides, the rivers meander. It creates a variety of structures in the habitat watercourses.

The wood offers habitats such as still water zones and hiding places that attract many rare species of animals today: crayfish. Shells and fish. Especially branches and treetops create spawning grounds for fish and amphibians.

A habitat that has become rarer today is largely characterized by deadwood: the alluvial forest. Broken forests and swamps are also habitats that would not exist without dying and dead trees.

Dead trees have many positive effects on rivers, such as increasing biodiversity. (Image: Karin Jähne / fotolia.com)

"Clean up" and destroy biodiversity

Unfortunately, the economic benefits of forests and the creation of parks for recreation traditionally means removing dead wood. Although the Germans "love" the forest, and he belongs to the German mental history as the sea to the British, but the forest for hiking should be "like an orderly garden". Dead trees are considered "untidy".

The ecological significance of these is not reflected in the land conservation laws. Only in Saxony are "cave-rich single trees" and "deadwood-rich waste wood islands" explicitly protected.

The economic forest in Germany is not a forest subject to the natural process of growing, maturing and dying. On almost the entire area outside of national parks and nature reserves, the trees are felled before they can die off and form deadwood.

As a result of rising heating costs, more and more people are turning to wood stoves, with the result that even wood that was uneconomical in the meantime can again be sold lucratively: mushroom wood, break wood or branch cut.

"Remove pests"

In the forestry and in the allotment garden there were, in spite of all ecological facts, measures to remove "pests" the basis. To this day, this madness is still in many gardener colonies: allotment magazines publish in the same issue articles about the insect killing with building instructions for insect hotels and call at the same time to remove the dead wood, as this was a "breeding ground of pests".

This thinking comes from a time when useful forest and garden were thought of as a system controlled by the forester or gardener. Just as the "gardeners" used the lethal injection to destroy every naturally-grown wild plant and kill ants, bugs and mosquitoes with pesticides, the foresters removed every decaying tree stump and every branch that a storm had torn to the ground.

The result was an extremely species-poor forest, which had only the name in common with a grown mixed forest. What's more, the cleared spruce monocultures without dead or dead wood meant that forest pests in particular could multiply extremely.

The dense canopy of spruce made it hard to grow deciduous trees, barely any snow or rain came to the ground and flowers, herbs, shrubs and other plants disappeared, with them the animals to which they provide food and habitat.

Thus, while monoculture and the removal of dead wood should prevent infestation by pests, the opposite happened. On the only planted trees specialized wood eaters such as the bark beetle could in this paradise firstly explode explosively, secondly lacked now their natural predators.

The deadwood strategy

Only gradually did it become clear that dead trees are necessary for a stable forest. The federal government's biodiversity strategy today recommends leaving a significant proportion of these in the forest.

Only slowly came the realization that deadwood is also essential for productive forests. (Image: G. Wahl / fotolia.com)

However, this has no legal character, but consumers can help: A high proportion of dead wood is a crucial criterion in certifying wood as sustainable. Only if this remains in the forest, there is the FSC seal.

Gardener against the "ugliness"

Urban gardeners usually remove dead wood from the roadside and city parks because it is considered unaesthetic. Another reason to dispel it is road safety. If a tree falls on a traffic route, the owner is to blame. This applies to private owners as well as municipalities.

However, this does not apply to the "open corridor" or "unused land" and not to the "existing forest". Here, the owners are not liable. Especially in Germany gardeners and forest owners who leave the old wood are often considered "messy", an assumption that probably every gardener has ever heard. A quote from the conservationist Konrad Guenther from 1910 shows a German practice in the forest:

"But how unsightly is the sight of transparent, underwood-less forests, in which perhaps the trees are planted after the string and now stand in straight lines and at well-spaced intervals like a regiment of soldiers."

The peasant economy used the forest mainly for fuel and lumber. To leave dead wood was a waste. Sources from the 19th century prove that farmers only entered the woods near their village when timber was expelled.

Ordnungshahn and garbage disposal

In the case of traditional garden owners, however, the notion of a "natural idyll" goes hand in hand with delusional reason. Many even reject bark mulch in their front yard as a way-out because it looks "dirty". For others, a garden is only a garden when they have pulled out all the stumps and drove the branch to the recycling center.

It does not matter to these cleanliness freaks whether the blackthorn, blackberry and elder in the neighbor's Totholze corner are in line with the garden regulations, according to which edible fruit and vegetables are to be planted in the allotment, but the hydrangea or the English turf is not. Nor do they realize the bad joke of setting up insect hotels and hanging birds' nest boxes while stealing the livelihood of birds and insects.

The idea of ​​a "decent forest" that does not smell like moder, in which no trunk rots in the water and no ants crawl out of a dead tree stump, unfortunately still today leads private gardeners and communities to empty parks, urban forests and fallow land of dead wood clear and thus threatened animal and plant species do not give a chance.

Parks and green spaces are often "cleaned" of dead wood and thus provide no habitat for endangered animal and plant species. (Image: murasal / fotolia.com)

What to do?

Do you have your own property, a fallow land, a farm, just a front yard? In order to protect and restore the deadwood habitat nationwide, forestry and agriculture must forego a proportion of the area's land use. The resettlement by specialized beetles and specialized insects can hardly be made possible on their own square meters.

But on a small scale, you can certainly do something. Tree-hole breeders, who otherwise drive mainly dead trees, find a substitute in nesting boxes for titmice, garden red tails, starlings, etc. Perforated bricks and reeds, clay slabs and wooden blocks with drilled tubes of different sizes provide insects with the shelter they otherwise find in decayed wood.

Use deadwood - do not throw it away

The best is the dead wood itself. Again, you can not expect miracles. Specialists who are set on the biochemistry of rotting beech or oak can hardly thrive in the branch cut that occurs in the garden. However, you can offer species with a broader spectrum of life a decent substitute in the garden.

For example, when sawing a tree, you can leave the stump and drill holes for insects or stack branch-cut on a pile of rice. Is that too messy for you? Then you can bring in the wood in many ways in the garden structure, be it as Benjeshecke, as a raised bed, as scaffolding or bird house.

A Benjes hedge

A Benjes hedge is a hedge made up of branches, twigs and trunks. The brothers Heinrich and Hermann Benjes made this nature hedge popular; However, farmers have been using such hedges for centuries for practical reasons.

For such a hedge, you will first cast posts or thick branches into the ground, two each, at the same height, and, depending on the width of the hedge, between 50 cm and one meter apart. These should be about 2 meters apart. Such a hedge can be four, but also 100 meters long.

In half meter or meter between the posts you now stack your branch cut, preferably so that the long branches are limited by the posts and the small wood does not fall out of the limit. With enough branch cut you can reach a stable border with your neighbors, a wind and privacy protection, but above all a valuable biotope in the long run.

You can also connect the individual posts on the outside with ropes and hold the knots. Caution: Do not lay branches too close. Sense of a Benjes hedge is that the seeds germinate in the green section in the hedge. If the branches are too dense, you will not enjoy a sea of ​​flowers.

A tip: If you take branches from the garden trees, especially fruit trees or pasture, then you can also weave the "pillars" in the hedge. This then supports itself.

In a so-called Benjes hedge pruning is loosely piled up to a wall. (Image: Luckyboost / fotolia.com)

This hedge grows: If there is another branch cut, you can just put it in the Benjes hedge. The hedge initially has two advantages: First, it costs you nothing except the post. Second, it initially does not require care.

A wild hedge

They can, as some farmers and some nature gardeners do, make the hedge wild: perennials, wildflowers and herbs settle by themselves, birds and the wind distribute the seeds, and within a few years, the dead wood has become a living structure.

Depending on the other circumstances, ie pH of the soil, stony, sandy, moist, sunny or shady, certain plants settle on. One of the pioneers you can count on is the blackberry. Hawthorn and rose hips also spread birds with their feces. Competitive plants such as stinging nettles and goldenrod come by themselves - both are good food for insects.

A growth process

A Benjes hedge develops from a dead wood to a scrub hedge, thus forming shoots, resulting in a herb layer and later a single plant. After several years, everything grows into a field hedge. You do not have to fertilize the deadwood hedge or feed it otherwise, because bacteria and fungi decompose the wood, resulting in humus, which in turn promotes the growth of hedges.

Plants for the Benjes hedge

If you have brought in the hedge earth, daisies, dyer chamomile, yarrow, thistle or stinging nettles spread quickly. At the latest after the first year you can systematically plant the hedge with shrubs, wildflowers and bushes. In the natural garden, you should choose native plants that feed insects and birds.

tendrils

Do you want a green wall? Then plant wild wine, wild or rambler roses, ivy, hops or clematis on the hedge. Within a few years you will cover them. Even climbing flowering plants such as nasturtium, winches and wakes are suitable.

The hedges are a paradise for berry bushes, which find their way to them. Blue, white, spiny, goji and blackcurrants thrive here magnificently.

shrubbery

Ideally, put the hedge in front of a row of trees or plant trees behind it. Bushes that are suitable for the area around and at the same time are valuable food plants for birds, are bird cherry, elder, blackthorn, dogwood, honeysuckle, snowball, rock pear, ornamental quince, ornamental apple or Pfaffenhütchen.

For the area around the Benjeshecke around, bushes such as elder or honeysuckle are very good. (Image: visuals-and-concepts / fotolia.com)

Plants that colonize wood and solid humus, ie ferns and mosses, are suitable as surface cover.

For the rooms in front of the hedge and possible humus or compost, which they bring into the hedge, we recommend: Bluestar, Crocuses, Daffodils, Wild Tulips, Allium, Märzenbecher, Lily-of-the-valley, Wood anemone and in the summer seed ribbons with cornflowers, wild carrot, Mullein or borage.

wild perennials

Wild shrubs around the Benjes hedge quickly ensure that the hedge no longer looks like a "pile of wood", but rather like a flower hedge. Suitable plants include: Hollyhocks, clary sage, bluebells, labweed, Apothecary roses, mallows, thimble and checkerboard flowers.

Likewise offer themselves honor price, soapwort, elven flower, carnation, widow's flower, adder's head, Geißklee, Leimkraut, lady's mantle, Fetthenne, or snapdragon.

Even kitchen and medicinal herbs feel well protected by the hedge: mint such as lemon balm, St. John's wort and chives, tarragon, marjoram and lovage.

An animal paradise

A Benjes hedge in the open corridor offers animals a corridor that does not cross vast areas. In the garden, amphibians, birds and mammals find refuge, breeding grounds and food, which disappear from the cleared city gardens:

Wren, Hedgehog, Whitethroat, Blackbird and Song Thrush, Robins, Fitis, Zilpzalp and Redstart. Mammals such as mice, seven- and gardeners, dormouse, hedgehogs and shrews, common toads, pond and mountain newts, wild bees, wild bumblebees, wasps, beetles and lacewings.

What do you have to pay attention to?

If you plant the hedge in the garden, then the soil here is usually nutrient-rich. This favors fast-growing perennials, especially of goldenrod or nettle, which take slow-growing plants such as dogwood's light. Therefore, for certain shrubs that you absolutely want to have in the hedge, you should put on already pulled specimens that have a length of about 50-100 cm.

How are you??

In the second part of our series "Dead wood - hotbed of life" you will learn how to create a raised bed or a hedgerow border with wood, compost and foliage. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)

swell
http://www.buergerimstaat.de/1_01/wald01.htm
http://www.heimat-fuer-tiere.de/deutsch/projekte/benjeshecken.shtml