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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 Evolution of terms
Those advocating the dissolution of forestry as a discipline point to the falling enrolments in
traditional forestry programmes, the advantages of ‘forestry’ students receiving training in a
range of different faculties, and the advantages associated with having faculty members
located throughout a campus rather in one single place. A few forestry schools have been able
to avoid the trend for reduced enrolments, but generally, forestry faculties have been
amalgamated with other faculties, or forestry has been dropped altogether. In Australia, for
example, there have never been separate forestry departments (Kanowski 2004) and the
School of Forest and Ecosystem Science at the University of Melbourne is a part of the
Faculty of Land and Food Resources. The forestry programme at the Australian National
University is based in the School of Resources, Environment and Society, whereas the forestry
programme at Southern Cross University is based in the School of Environmental Science and
Management. At the University of Queensland, the forestry programme is based in the School
of Natural and Rural Systems Management, and the Bachelor of Science in Sustainable
Forestry at Edith Cowan University in Perth is housed in the School of Natural Sciences. It is a
feature of these academic units that only one of the four mentions the word ‘forest’, and the
term ‘forestry’ is absent altogether, yet all consider ‘forestry’ sufficiently important that they
offer degrees in the subject.
Elsewhere, the Department of Forestry and Range Management at the University of Arid
Agriculture, Rawalpindi (Pakistan) is located within the Faculty of Livestock and Range
Management. In the UK, the Department of Forestry at the University of Aberdeen merged with
the Departments of Agriculture, Zoology and Plant and Soil Science to form the School of
Biological Sciences, and the School of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences at the University of
Wales in Bangor was renamed the School of the Environment and Natural Resources and
located in the College of Natural Sciences. Like the University of Oxford, the University of
Edinburgh no longer offers an undergraduate degree in forestry (although an honours degree in
Ecological Science, with a specialisation in forestry, is available), but an MSc in forest ecology
and management is offered by the School of Geosciences.
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