Assess your local hazelwood

You don't need to be able to identify the many species that inhabit Atlantic hazel, or be a woodland specialist, to assess the importance of your local hazel woods for biodiversity. We have developed a simple assessment table  that leads you through a series of questions to answer whilst in the hazel stand.

Assessment summary

The first stage is to fit your wood into one of four types:

• Closed canopy, multi-stemmed stands of pure hazel
• Scattered stools in pasture
• Veteran stools
• Hazel in woodland (including ravines)

You are then invited to give a brief description of the area e.g.:

"along lower edge of slope, backing on to grazed fields above, and shaded burn below - hazel stands quite open with scattered old bushes; canopy closed in some places, but forming open gladed mosaics. Stools typically with few to about 20 stems per stool, with little evidence of young shoots establishing. Hazel gloves seen on a couple of bushes. Occasional hawthorn present, with willow around burn. Grazed by sheep all year round".

The next step is to assess the condition of your hazel wood habitat by answering a few questions about e.g.:

• canopy cover
• stool size
• ground flora
• whether the stems are covered with mosses, liverworts and lichens
• grazing evidence
• number of old 'veteran' stools

Finally, you are asked to look for some easy to identify indicator species and the general cover of particular groups of species.

Each question is assigned a score, which is then used to assess the relative importance of your hazel wood against a table of threshold scores.

Download the assessment form    for more details.

Next steps

The purpose of this exercise is to discover potentially species rich stands of Atlantic hazel, and to encourage sympathetic management, or at least to avoid the worst of unsympathetic management by simply raising awareness.

If you own the woodland and want to improve the management through an SRDP application, either you or your SRDP Case Officer are advised to contact Gordon Gray Stephens, the Atlantic Hazel Action Group (AHAG) project officer for further advice. Gordon will advise whether you need to seek specialist advice to make a simple "dip-in" visit to confirm the results of the Biodiversity Assessment. The results will be taken into account when seeking to put together an application for funding support from SRDP or entry into the Woodland Grazing Toolbox  initiative.