shade from trees and water uptake from tree roots may reduce drought impacts. Trees Silvopasture is compatible with fruit, nut, and timber production. Grazing can serve as a cost-effective vegetation and weed control method. Silvopasture can also help reduce pests and disease in orchards - when introduced into an orchard after harvest, livestock are able to consume unharvested fruits, preventing pests and diseases from spreading via these unharvested fruits and in some cases consuming the pests themselves. Methods Silvopasture can be established by planting trees into existing pasture or by establishing pasture in existing woodland. The two methods differ significantly in the challenges they present. Integrating trees into pasture Planting trees into existing pasture presents several challenges: young trees must be protected from livestock, trees may take years to become productive (depending on the species), and planting trees in a pasture can limit the ability to use that land for other purposes in the future. Integrating pasture into woodland Integrating pasture into existing woodland presents challenges as well: the woodland likely needs to be thinned to increase light infiltration, which is time consuming and may require heavy machinery, as well as a strategy for dealing with felled trees. Thinned woodlands are also likely to experience a flush of growth in weeds and seedling trees that must be dealt with to prevent the pasture from being overgrown. Pasture forages may also need to be established beneath the trees, a process which can be difficult if trees have already been felled. History According to the wood-pasture hypothesis, open, grazed woodlands of some form or another would have been part of the original European wildwoods even before they were used by humans. Fruit and nut and silvopasture systems covered large portions of central Europe until the 20th century, and are still-widespread in some areas. Wood pasture, one of the oldest land-use practices in human history, is a historical European land management system in which open woodland provided shelter and forage for grazing animals, particularly sheep and cattle, as well as woodland products such as timber for construction and fuel, coppiced stems for wattle and charcoal making and pollarded poles. Since Roman times, pigs have been released into beech and oak woodlands to feed on the acorn and beech mast, and into fruit orchards to eat fallen fruit. United Kingdom Tree species and planting densities are studied over a range of sites at The