g. oak Quercus robur, lime Tilia cordata, maple Acer platanoides, ash Fraxinus excelsior, elm Ulmus glabra, and hazel Corylus avellana, on richer soils and on sites with a warmer microclimate. All land with southern deciduous trees is much affected by present and former human land-use. Lime trees rarely dominate the stands, being rather scattered among other southern deciduous trees, mainly oak. Parks and a few other stands are exceptions. As in most of Europe, the older trees in the Mälaren area grew up in a landscape with large areas of hay meadows and grazing lands for cattle (Emanuelsson 2009), which are today click here either still grazed or

regrowing with younger trees. Fig. 1 Map over the sampling sites. Characteristics

for the sites selleck chemicals are listed in Table 6 Lime trees were often pollarded to produce winter fodder for cattle, and wood, including the tough fibres in the bast, for a variety of uses. This practice was almost totally abandoned in the first half of the 1900s, but on many of the inventoried sites the trees have a conspicuous conformation from having been pollarded in LY2835219 in vivo earlier times. Lime trees in parks have also usually been pollarded, but for aesthetic reasons. On some of the natural stands however, there are no visible traces of pollarding. The limes in the natural sites are the small-leaved lime T. cordata, whereas most limes in parks are the common lime T. × europea, a hybrid between T. cordata and T. platyphyllos (Bengtsson 2005). Around lake Mälaren there are many old estates that were built by the nobility. As described above, most of these estates had large parks established 250–350 years ago, an important feature of which were avenues of limes. Selection

of sites Most study sites were selected for survey according to the criterion that they should contain lime trees that had the potential to host those species encompassed by an action plan for saproxylic beetles on lime (Ehnström 2006; Jonsell and Sahlin 2010) i.e. sites with old hollow lime-trees. The selection was mainly made by the county administrative boards in the respective county (three are included) based on information from inventories of valuable trees about and on their personal knowledge. In addition, data from three other park inventories were included in this study (Andersson 2010; Jonsell 2004, 2008). In total, 27 sites were used and they were categorised as either ‘Open’ (8), ‘Re-grown’ (11) or ‘Park’ (8). The maximum area of a site was a few hectares, but was usually less than one. Each site was registered by GPS according to its Swedish national grid coordinates, RT90, where one unit = 1 m. All ‘Open’ sites were grazed wooded meadows (Fig. 2a). Lime dominated only one site. In the other sites lime was mixed with other coarse trees, mainly oaks.