Wooded meadow

Wooded meadows (also named wood-meadows, park meadows, etc.) are ecosystems in temperate forest regions. They are sparse natural stands with a regularly mowed herbaceous layer.

While frequent throughout Europe during the Medieval period and before, wooded meadows have largely disappeared. Wooded meadows originated with the practices of hunter-gatherer communities. They were important in terms of social organization around a natural resource and determined much of the community's interactions with the natural world.^[1] In the early 20th century, wooded meadows were used for fruit cultivation in Sweden; however, their prevalence has decreased substantially due to changes in land management and a movement toward more intensive types of agroecosystems.^[2] The more typical, calcicolous^{[further explanation needed]} wooded meadows are common around the Baltic Sea.^[3]

Wooded meadows have high species richness. In some of the current Estonian wooded meadows, world-record species densities have been recorded (up to 76 species of vascular plants per square meter).^[4]

• Kull, Kalevi; Kukk, Toomas; Lotman, Aleksei 2003. When culture supports biodiversity: The case of wooded meadow. In: Roepstorff, Andreas; Bubandt, Nils; Kull, Kalevi (eds.) 2003. Imagining Nature: Practices of Cosmology and Identity. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 76–96. (pdf)

• On wooded meadows at the Estonian Seminatural Community Conservation Association site

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