In 1961, British scientists stopped farming a 4-hectare barley field and left it alone; 60 years later...

The four-hectare barley field was abandoned in 1961 after researchers harvested its final crop, allowing nature to take over without further human intervention. In 1961, researchers at Monks Wood in Cambridgeshire harvested a final crop of barley from a four-hectare agricultural plot known as Stocking Close, ploughed the soil and walked away. They did not plant a single tree, build a fence or protect young saplings with plastic tubes. Yet over the next six decades, the bare farmland naturally developed into a dense, closed-canopy native woodland. The long-term natural experiment, monitored by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), shows that passive rewilding can restore biodiverse native woodland on lowland farmland in a surprisingly short time. The peer-reviewed findings, published in PLOS ONE under the title Long-term woodland restoration on lowland farmland through passive rewilding, provide important evidence for national afforestation strategies and show that nature can restore itself without expensive artificial intervention.How thorny scrub protects young oaksResearchers tracked vegetation changes across two nearby farmland plots that were abandoned decades apar...