ABSTRACT

Non-woodland trees include a wide variety of formations and plant species organised in diverse ways and located in multiple rural, urban fringe and urban environments throughout the world. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) suggests a definition within the framework of an evaluation of the world’s wood resources – non-woodland trees correspond to all the trees which are not found in forests or in other wooded areas (Bellefontaine et al., 2001). For the FAO, non-woodland trees include groves (small woods with less than 0.5 hectares), trees located in well-wooded agricultural areas (such as bocage, modern agro-forest systems, family gardens and orchards), trees in urban spaces, alignment trees along roads and isolated trees in the landscape. These structural and spatial criteria facilitate the creation of inventories or maps (notably thanks to photo-interpretation tools), but they neglect the dimension of practices as well as the history of these landscapes.