Oh, neat. Now every time I get my hands on a bilingual EN-ES dictionary I’m going to check if it includes coto as a possible translation for forest 
And what a great book it is. Are the rest of The Red Wheel novels of a similar standard?
Prussia pretty much developed modern forestry management, with large plantings of single species managed to maximise timber production. By the time Samazonov’s army invaded those forests had been managed for over a century.
Here ‘woods’ is indeterminate. Forest is more determinate, but so vast as to be useless. So if you’re trying to be indeterminate, you use ‘woods.’ If you’re trying to be determinate, you would typically designate wild locations by mountain or stream or geographic featuer or nearby habitation rather than specific Forest or Woods. Occasionally you might say ‘I’m gonna go fishing in the Mon this weekend’ (Referring to Monongahela National Forest) if you were intentionally trying to be vague, but wanted to convey a rough amount of information, probably that you were going into high country for trout. Much more likely you’d say ‘I’m going up Otter Creek.’ or ‘Near Bald Knob’ or ‘Up Backbone (Mountain)’ or ‘in Smokey Hollow’ or ‘Down the (Blackwater) Canyon’ or ‘Up above the (Cheat) Narrows.’ when referring to being in a wild area and you wanted people to know where. Our ‘Forests’ are so big and essentially take up the whole state, so simply saying ‘I’m going to be in the Mon.’ means you’re anywhere within 1500 square miles. It’s nearly useless information.
I volunteer as a member of the board on my HOA, and part of my responsibilities include helping to manage our deeded forest, which is just over 8 hectares of woods with a minor river tributary running through it.
The number of members of our association who believe that we should remove every fallen and felled tree, every fallen branch, and rake the leaves in order to make the woods pristine never ceases to amaze me. It’s as if they think that a forest is supposed to be a well-manicured lawn. I had to make it a point this past summer to take boring pictures of every place I hiked just to show the membership what “real woods” look like.
Russian Imperial Army.
The Russians started their involvement in WW1 by invading East Prussia in August 1914.
German forestry has always been rather interesting in that it provides no real conclusions but everyone can point to one aspect of it to make a point, either supporting their beliefs or negating some other opinion.
By the early 1800s Germany had all but used up their natural forest reserves and took on an aggressive program of replanting their forests in spruce and scotch pine plantations. They were early developers of the theories of “soil rent”, aggressive management short rotation fast growing plantations, and “forest rent”, longer rotations more diversity. These plantations were highly managed and proved that plantations style forestry can successfully produce wood, but at a cost to other forest resources like wildlife habitat.
What gets really interesting is that 150 years later, after who knows how many rotations, they started documenting a downward trend in timber production and loss of productivity in their plantations and nobody could figure out why. It was a pretty big deal in forestry circles for a while and provided a lot of theories as to what was happening, everything from nutrient depletion to acid rain. It also lead to some pretty big environmental changes in the 1970’s which coincided with the general change in environmental thinking during that time. Eventually, the plantations rebounded to previous growth rates, and are still providing wood, and a lot of German forest are managed less aggressively that in the past with a thought to conservation and other forest resources.
In the end German forests are fairly unremarkable, but people have a tendency to use them to support or negate any and all opinions about forestry, management, environmentalism, pollution ect.
I’m British, and this is the first time I’ve heard this particular distinction. I would use them pretty much interchangeably, with a small understanding that woods are smaller than forests.
Ah, thank you, I didn’t remember that invasion from WWI.
Your view probably makes sense for the mid west, but in CA we typically do not see any rain between April-ish and October-ish. Around 5 months of dryness. A large oak tree that falls will remain in place for a few decades, and at the end of each dry period it will be ready to burn long and hot. Add more leaves and branches each year from surrounding vegetation and you have a nice pile of kindling on top of a few dozen cords of firewood.
The problem is not that trees and branches fall all the time, it’s that they remain there and never get cleaned-out, presenting a fire hazard for nearby communities and infrastructure. Since nature’s solution of periodic burning is not permitted any more, things stack-up until there is a catastrophic event. It may not make sense to keep clean a mid-western forest nearby to a community, but out west it is starting to make sense to do something more than nothing.
Yeah, that thing is controlled burns as I mentioned above. Problem is that people don’t want them. They come with risk of getting out of control and they make things look ugly. People don’t want spoiled views and they certainly don’t want to spend government money on spoiled views and smoky air. It’s a NIMBY issue.
Agree. It seems like an intractable situation. People don’t want to take preventive measures, so are willing to accept the occasional community getting burned off the map. 
No, it was the Imperial Army prior to the Revolution.
A professional forest management guy once told me it’s all basically about getting rid of dead wood and foliage. So, cleaning up.
The risk of getting out of control is my concern.
About 1% do, so it’s not a non-existent risk. At the same time, controlled burns are done during the times of year when the weather is most likely to aid in their extinguishment, so when they do get out of control, they tend to be much less destructive than randomly occurring fires. Of course, if you’re the person who started a prescribed burn that gets out of control and takes out a town, people are not going to be happy. If a random fire wipes out half the state, then it’s a shrug and a ‘bad things happen.’ If a prescribed burn takes out a couple of houses, then it’s ‘gross incompetence’ and ‘heads need to roll.’ For some reason, we’re more comfortable with the very great risk of complete annihilation at random rather than a smaller risk of less damage through cause. It’s a trolley problem in real life where inaction is preferable to action despite us completely knowing that the consequences of our inaction are far worse than the consequences of our action.
It seems to me that dead trees lying about the forest are as much a part of the place as living trees. Cleaning out all the dead wood would have unintended consequences. We had a recent infestation of some sort of beetle around here not long ago. What were formerly dead, standing trees are now falling over. Its unsightly as hell and I thought, “Why not go in and harvest those trees for firewood or whatever before they rot?” But rotting is a good thing as everything is returned to the soil, eventually. Better to have the carbon in the ground than in the air. In another 20 years there will be no signs of the problem other than a lack of big trees.
I’m assuming you’re talking about Emerald Ash Borer which very probably might end up causing the extinction of ash trees in North American. The reason they aren’t harvested is that many ash trees affected are too small to bother with since those that have reached harvestable size have likely been harvested and the stands left are still in a growing phase, combined with the fact that most woodlands are less than 20% ash, so getting equipment in to just the affected trees is difficult without damaging the rest of the woodland. Also, the logs cannot be transported to slow the progress of the invasive, so you have to mill it on site which isn’t conducive to large scale operations. There’s just little profit to be made in it. If you have your own stand and just want to clean it up or you think waste not, want not, you can certainly do it, but not many people choose to bother.