Sunday 8 May 2011

Poster

This is to be a poster design that represents forests being cut down. The question mark is there to make people think why are the trees gone? where did they go? for what purpose are they gone?

Saturday 7 May 2011

This is perhaps a sort of logo, im not entirely sure what part i could use it for though.  It is a tree going through the seasons basically.

All of these were created by using the same technique

Fake Vector

For this project we had to create a series of vector images but Adobe Illustrator might aswell be in a foreign language because i cannot create vector images SO this is my 'fake vector' which i created my using a photo i took of a field in the village i live in; tredington. I then loaded the image up in photoshop > filter gallery > cutout. I think it kinda looks like a vector image...

Tuesday 3 May 2011

Tredington 2010
I live in a small village called Tredington which is 9 miles from Stratford upon avon. Over the past 7 months a great deal of change has occured to the surrounding woodland. The picture above is the front of Tredington woodland in mid july of 2010, the one below is the woodland in january 2011...

Tredington 2011
 Bit of a difference?! This image was taken from the opposite end to the previous picture. 7 months and about 80% of the woodland has been hacked down. I live about a 1-2 minute walk from the woodland and before it was lush and completely covered in trees even in the depth of winer it was beautiful now it is a barren, muddy, plot of land. It looks more like a scar on the land then anything else. Im thoroughly disgusted! 

How forests effect climate change

Deforestation, and especially the destruction of rainforests, is a hugely significant contributor to climate change. Scientists estimate that forest loss and other changes to the use of land account for around 23% of current man-made CO2 emissions – which equates to 17% of the 100-year warming impact of all current greenhouse-gas emissions. As children are taught at school, trees and other plants absorb CO2 from the air as they grow. Using energy from the sun, they turn the carbon captured from the CO2 molecules into building blocks for their trunks, branches and foliage. This is all part of the carbon cycle.
A mature forest doesn't necessarily absorb much more CO2 that it releases, however, because when each tree dies and either rots down or is burned, much of its stored carbon is released once again. In other words, in the context of climate change, the most important thing about mature forests is not that they reduce the amount of CO2 in the air but that they are huge reservoirs of stored carbon. If such a forest is burned or cleared then much of that carbon is released back into the atmosphere, adding to atmospheric CO2 levels.
Of course, the same process also works in reverse. If trees are planted where previously there weren't any, they will on soak up CO2 as they grow, reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It is thought that trees, plants and other land-based "carbon sinks" currently soak up more than a quarter of all the CO2 that humans add to the air each year – though that figure could change as the planet warms.
Unsurprisingly, the relationship between trees and local and global temperature is more complicated than the simple question of the greenhouse gases they absorb and emit. Forests have a major impact on local weather systems and can also affect the amount of sunlight absorbed by the planet: a new area of trees in a snowy region may create more warming than cooling overall by darkening the land surface and reducing the amound of sunlight reflected back to space. 

What the hell is going on!?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/05/illegal-timber-sold-in-britain

Forests in the UK

The United Kingdom is one of the least forested countries in Europe. Historically, woodland habitats would have taken up a prominent amount of the country, the most common type of vegetation being broadleaved trees such as oak, ash and lime. However over the past 5,000 years, 90% of this cover has been lost, due mainly to human activity: cutting firewood and clearance for agriculture. By the beginning of this century, woodland cover was reduced to just 5% of the land area of Britain. Today, forest cover is estimated at around 10% which is 2.5 million hectare (1 ha = 10,000m2 and 100 ha = 1 km2), but much of that around 6-7% is composed of conifer plantations, mostly non-native species, some of which have been planted on sites which had high biodiversity value as open ground. Areas of Britain that have remained continually wooded since 1600 cover about 1% of the land surface of Britain (300,000 ha), and around 16,000 ha of distinctive Caledonian Pine Forest remains in a few Scottish glens. In total, native woodland makes up just 2.5% of the land area of Great Britain.

Current government policy aims to increase woodland cover, both plantations of exotic species and native woodland, for production as well as for environmental and social purposes. There is a specific target to plant 5,000 ha of new native woodland each year [1], and a number of forest creation projects exist (e.g. the National Forest, Central Scotland Forest, the Millennium Forest).
Size of forest areas in Britain is variable, from small woodlands of 0.25 ha to the 50,000 ha Kielder forest in the north of England, one of the largest man-made forests in Europe. The majority of forests in England, however, are less than 50 ha. In Scotland, on the other hand, two thirds of the forests are over 500 ha.
Forest and woodland ownership is divided between private and public. The government forest service, the Forestry Commission, manages about 35% of the country’s woodland, about 10% is owned by other public voluntary bodies, 20% by farmers and 35% by other private owners .
The extent of production forestry differs between woodland type, conifer plantations being very largely production forests. The UK produces around 15% of its timber needs from domestic forests; efforts have been and continue to be made to stimulate the timber industry, and it is predicted that the volume of wood from British forests will increase from almost 9 million cubic metres per year today (up from 4 million cubic metres in the 1970s) to 15 million cubic metres per year in 2020. Particular efforts are being made to revitalise traditional management in neglected broadleaved woodland.
Whilst much of the forest was lost in historical times, the middle part of this century also saw a significant decline, and approximately 45% of the ancient and semi-natural woodland that existed in 1945 has been lost since that time . The major causes have been conversion to agriculture or replacement with conifer plantations. Losses from these causes should, in theory at least, have ceased in 1985 with the introduction of the government’s broadleaf policy.