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[Trollhammaren]

If you just want to get rid of the trees ballista arrows is the way to go. You can even fire them through fortifications so the siege operator isn't even exposed to the cavern.

My experiences of magma and trees differs from those of Trollhammaren, though. Pouring magma onto trees cause a bit of burning in the canopy, and that's it. I've even had trees growing in magma that had their canopies catch fire every few years starting a cavern fire (they grew by a broken magma tube). You can, however, cut off the map edge inside of the trees rather than outside either through obsidianization or cave-ins.

Could it have to do with the amount of magma? I cast it liberally, up to 7/7 next to the tree top, leading to tree branches occupying parts of the map edge burning away and being able to cast past. Or maybe I was lucky. Trees definitely don't burn easy, though.

Pretty much irrelevant if the goal is just to dry the cavern lake, and not wall the caverns off, though, since you don't need to actually reach the map edge, just put a wall between it and the main water mass. Pour enough magma and it will definitely cut the edge off at some point, leading to the cavern lake becoming finite. Then just pump/drain it out.

[PatrikLundell]

My experience with pouring liberal amounts of magma onto trees have been that some of the magma pour off the sides of the canopy, some canopy fire, but no actual destruction (and sometimes a pocket of 7/7 magma gets trapped on top/in between the tree and a wall). However, I haven't seen trees destroyed by forest fires either, but other people have done so, so it's quite possible there is a chance for magma actually managing to destroy fungal trees (or parts of them) without me seeing it. I gave up trying to burn trees with magma after a few failed attempts. I've since STARTED a cavern forest fire by pouring magma onto a tree, with disappointing effects (the undead I was trying to set on fire remained essentially unharmed, despite the fire).

I think NW_Kohaku is out of sync with the current working of trees (pre multilevel tree influence?). Trees require at least two levels of headroom (this and the one above) to mature from sapling to a tree, and saplings can't be cut (but trampled/made dirt road on top, etc. to get destroyed). They also take about 3 years to mature (it's not fixed, the first ones will mature a bit faster than 3 years).

I've only made one fort since multi-tile trees, and I only made multi-z containers for them, so I guess I didn't test to see that they wouldn't grow at all without more "headroom".

Still, the system previously mentioned works well, regardless, you just make the cycle longer or add more boxes or accept that it might take more than one cycle for trees to actually show up.  (Use traffic designations to make dwarves walk around saplings rather than trample them.) You aren't going to get tree saturation in two years any way you cut it.

Limited post multi level tree experience would explain it. While the scheme would work, it's a huge overkill. my understanding is that the single tile trees yielded fairly little wood, while the current trees provide quite a lot (usually: saguaros don't provide much). Thus, a single 31*31 room in the soil level would provide a fair bit of wood once it starts to produce trees. And, keeping traffic away from the tree farm is good advice.
However, it's usually faster to secure a cavern and drain a lake than to set up a tree farm, but that's provided you want to secure the cavern rather than keeping it open to keep the danger level up (but still somehow have a safe wood supply).

[NW_Kohaku]

Limited post multi level tree experience would explain it. While the scheme would work, it's a huge overkill. my understanding is that the single tile trees yielded fairly little wood, while the current trees provide quite a lot (usually: saguaros don't provide much). Thus, a single 31*31 room in the soil level would provide a fair bit of wood once it starts to produce trees. And, keeping traffic away from the tree farm is good advice.
However, it's usually faster to secure a cavern and drain a lake than to set up a tree farm, but that's provided you want to secure the cavern rather than keeping it open to keep the danger level up (but still somehow have a safe wood supply).

Depends on what you're doing. 

Single-tile trees are 1 wood, yes, and the largest trees now can produce 50+ wood (I have woodcutters with lots of time on their hands, now...) although last I checked, underground trees like tower caps were bugged to only produce 1 wood, as well.

Still, thanks to heavy objects being slow to move, and stone being, you know, HEAVY, I found it worthwhile to actually, for the first time in Dwarf Fortress, treat wood as a readily expendable resource, and actually construct above-ground structures with the stuff, (bee houses and some exterior pallisades, not actual housing - I'm not SO far gone I'd make a dwarf sleep in a WOOD house...) liberally consume charcoal and make clear glass, maybe even use potash as fertilizer!

Maybe it's still gross overkill from old habits dying hard, but Dwarf Fortress is a game of better being safe than sorry. Plus, you can always use drowning chambers for other uses.

[PatrikLundell]

One of the 1:st cavern tree kinds often provides a single log only, while the other one provides a bit more (but not as much as blood thorn). I frequently use wood as a building material, but then usually surface wood. It also tends to be the case that I'm done building after a few years, i.e. about the time farms would start to produce something. But I agree it depends on your plans. If you see a large amount of char coal based steel production, you need wood for it, etc.
The other issue with tree farms is FPS drain. Something is fishy with trees in particular and vegetation in general. In a recent fortress I had a 10 FPS difference between viewing my workshop/underground farming area in a soil layer and my command center/tavern/library/temple area in a stone layer, This difference disappeared after I'd paved/floored almost all of the workshop level.

[Niddhoger]

I don't get why you need to re-flood the tree farms.  Do chopped trees delete the tile of artificial mud under them? I thought only built/deconstructed roads or floor would clear the mud.

I've never actiually made a tree-farm, tbh.  I either traded for wood, quickly imported magma up top, or had enough trees in the cavern/surface combined to supply my bedding/bin needs.  As someone else said, by the time the farms mature I no longer needed them.  The only artificial flooding I've done was for farms and pastures- both being only 1-z level deep. 

[PatrikLundell]

If you look carefully, you can see that chopping down cavern trees in some areas leaves bare (unmuddied) stone on the tile where the trunk stood. That means that such caverns will actually run out of trees in a few hundred years or so unless remuddied. I think this happens more often in muddied caverns (where everything is covered in mud, so you can't see if moss is growing there or not).

[NW_Kohaku]

It depends upon the scale of what you are doing. 

In LoudWhisper's SilentThunders, for example, an eternal necromancer siege cut off all trade, and he'd been playing for at least 25 years past that point in an evil biome with syndrome blood rain. LW flooded several floors he'd strip-mined to create a few floors of trees for massive harvesting operations. (This was back in the one-tile trees version, since he's been playing this fort for about 5 years, now...) This was necessary for all the training bolts he needed to ensure his entire dwarven population was a legendary marksdwarf.  Because of course the entire population is made of legendary warriors. (And if the younglings freshly inducted into adulthood aren't yet, they will be by the end of the next wave of zombie elves!)

[sculleywr]

If you have trees growing along the edge of a 1Z cliff, a woodcutter will happily run right out across the top level onto the tree itself, and cut the tree down, while standing on top of it.

Combine that outdoors with a goblin siege and you could get this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y30LAj502mY