What is a forest, and can cities such as London and Berlin by classified as forests?
There are hundreds of definitions of what constitutes a forest involving things like the number of trees, the height of trees, the land use, legal standings and ecological function.
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a forest is
“Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban use.”
Some people say that by this definition, cities like London and Berlin are technically forests as they have 20% or more of tree cover. However, as the land is predominantly under urban use, such claims do not really hold water. There are apparently almost as many trees as people in London, by the way, and over 40% of the city is made up of green spaces (see above), and about a third of Berlin is composed of forests, parks and gardens, rivers, canals, and lakes (see below).
Other definitions of forest include:
- A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods [source].
- A complex ecological system and natural resource in which trees are the dominant life-form [source].
- A dense growth of trees and underbrush covering a large tract; a tract of wooded land in England formerly owned by the sovereign and used for game [source].
- An extensive wood; a large tract of land covered with trees; in the United States, a wood of native growth, or a tract of woodland which has never been cultivated [source].
Historical, a forest in England was an area of land set aside as royal hunting ground or for other privileged use.
The word forest comes from Middle English forest (a forest, a wood, a preserve for hunting exclusive to royalty), from Old French forest (royal hunting ground, forest), from Early Medieval Latin forestis (a large area reserved for the use of the King or nobility, often a forest and often for hunting or fishing), possibly from Proto-West Germanic *furhisti (forest), from *furhiþi (forest) + *hursti (thicket, grove) [source].
Proto-West Germanic *hursti is also the root of horst (an elevated land overgrown with shrub) in Dutch, Horst (the nest of a bird of prey, an eyrie; bush, thicket, small forest [literary]) in German, and hurst (a wood or grove) in English, which appears mainly in placenames such as, Hurstpierpoint, Lyndhurst, Sissinghurst and Woodhurst [source].
Incidentally, in Middle English wode referred to forests and woods, as well as wood (material), and it also meant to hunt, to take to the woods, or to hide oneself in the woods. A forester or forest warden was a wodeward [source].
Sources and further information:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forest#English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest
https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-that-london-is-the-worlds-largest-urban-forest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin