Mast (botany) Mast seeding is defined as the highly variable production of fruit by a population. These intermittent pulses of food resources drive ecosystem-level functions and forest dynamics. The difference between a mast seeding year and a non-mast seeding year can be thousands of acorns, hickory nuts, beech nuts, etc. Mast seeding dominantly occurs in wind-pollinated tree species, but has also been observed in grasses and Dipterocarps. Masting, in the strict sense of the term, occurs only in monocarpic (or semelparous) species, whose members reproduce only once during their lifetime, then die. Hypothesis for the evolution of mast seeding can broadly be
English Lowlands beech forests its tannins had been leached out by soaking. Beechmast has also traditionally been fed to pigs. However, by 4000 BC, as Oliver Rackham has indicated, the dominant tree species was not the beech, but the small-leaved lime, also known as the pry tree. The wildwood was made up of a patchwork of lime-wood areas and hazel-wood areas, interspersed with oak and elm and other species. The pry seems to have become less abundant now because the climate has turned against it, making it difficult for it to grow from seed. Nevertheless, some remnants of ancient lime-wood still remain in south