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[Mostali]

Most of my first cavern layer is a lake with the usual tower-caps and fungiwood growing from it.  I've never really paid much attention to trees in lakes.

- Can you designate tree cutting from above the waterline?
- Will new trees grow from the lake?
- Even if you paved over the surface around the tree, how much wood will still fall into the water?

[Immortal-D]

- Unfortunately, no.  Trees must be cut at the base.
- Good question.  I've never cut a tree and then flooded that area.
- Same as question 1.

There are a couple options for harvesting lake trees; First is pump the lake somewhere else and build walls to prevent it from refilling.  Second is create a cave-in around the trees so you can dig straight through.  The more I think about it though, the somewhat random growth of leaves & branches near the top would make this quite difficult.  I think your best bet is Option 1.

[PatrikLundell]

- Trees can actually be cut at major branches above ground, provided you can get a woodcutter adjacent to it (I think it has to be some kind of level ground, i.e. not the top of a ramp, so a Down stair on top of an Up stair would work, for instance, or a floor). There's a fair risk the woodcutter will fall, however. Many kinds of fungal trees don't provide any access to their major branches either.
- Saplings can appear if the water level is low enough (<=3/7?) and these saplings can mature even if the water level is raised later.

You can use Immortal-D's cave-in to create a box around the tree, and then pump out the water inside the box. The box has to be wide enough to go outside the most remote twigs of the tree, however, since even the smallest twig will stop a cave-in and suspend the rock on top of it.

So, the best option is to drain the lake, which usually means you have to close off submerged cavern entrances. Those, however, are often made inaccessible by cavern trees... Such cavern trees can be disintegrated (no wood, and an actual hole in the water!) by hitting any part of the tree with a ballista arrow.

When cutting a tree the tree falls away from the woodcutter. If you're able to control which direction a woodcutter comes from, you can maximize the amount that falls on land (this doesn't answer the actual question, but I don't know the answer to that).

[Staalo]

If you're not in a hurry you could of course ignore those hard-to-get underwater trees and grow more accessible trees on an artificial island. Just use magma or cave-ins to create a suitable landmass and pour some water on it to get it all good and muddy. Within few years you should have plenty of trees growing on the island.

[Immortal-D]

If you're not in a hurry you could of course ignore those hard-to-get underwater trees and grow more accessible trees on an artificial island. Just use magma or cave-ins to create a suitable landmass and pour some water on it to get it all good and muddy. Within few years you should have plenty of trees growing on the island.

Oh, I hadn't even considered that.  Does muddy stone support trees?

[cerevox]

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.

[PatrikLundell]

Muddy stone supports underground trees, but not surface ones (muddy stone does not support any surface growth except on farm plots).

While island creation does work (and a cave-in may very well provide muddying at the same time), it's a lot of work. If your soil layer is at least two tiles thick you can just dig out a two tile high chamber with a soil floor and wait for about 3 years for subterranean trees to mature.
Draining the lake is probably less work than creating artificial islands in it as well.
It can be noted that cutting down trees on muddy floor often (always?) leaves a tile of unmuddied rock floor where the tree trunk was, so you'd need to remuddy your island every century or so.

[NW_Kohaku]

It's probably both easier and safer to just plain pump water into an artificial enclosure.  Underground "trees" will grow anywhere there is soil or mud, so simply making a stone "box" that you periodically flood carved purely from layer stone is enough.  You should consider making the box more than one z-level tall, however, or you only get one wood per "tree".

If you're willing to spend the effort on it, you could have 12 individual boxes with a plumbing system set up that will allow you to open 1 box to woodcutters for two months before being shut off, flooded, drained, and left to grow for 1 year and 10 months.  All this without needing to let any access to underground creatures so long as you properly control your water intake!  (I like aquifers for just this reason...)

[PatrikLundell]

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).

[Mostali]

I've carved out plenty of underground tree farms, but I don't think I've ever actually played a fortress long enough to harvest them.  (I guess that's not entirely true - I've never BOTH had a tree farm AND played the fortress that long).  I've also always just gone around cavern lakes.  I think my current fort is a keeper, which is why I was looking to actually deal with the cavern lake and its trees. 

[Trollhammaren]

I just finished making the caverns ready for harvest. New trees appear to be growing everywhere. Like yours, my caverns were mostly submerged.

You can do it from above, but cutting large submerged trees is NOT SAFE. Dwarves will fall into the water and drown. Learned this one the hard way. So the reasonable way to do it is to drain the cavern lake. There are two ways, you could use pumps and constructions, or magma casting.

Tree branches obscuring parts of the map edge is not a problem, since a good magma flood will burn the trees. Also, you do not need to reach the actual map edge - just separate it from the main body of water.

You can alternatively pump water away from where you're constructing and keep unsuspending construction, and eventually dwarves will get it done. I used this method to make part of the edge a controllable infinite water source. It was a total pain, but people have used the method to get into the magma sea so what do I know.

Now all those juicy mushrooms can be cut down and made into coal, potash and lye.

[Mostali]

My real desire is not so much for wood, but to build through the cavern and lake so my fortress is a solid column.  The lake trees are in the way.  I'm leaning toward obsidian casting a foundation, then pumping the water out.  But this leads me back to trees and them being in the way of casting the foundation.

[PatrikLundell]

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.

[Sanctume]

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 noted in one of the succession fort The Strip. 
z+0 is the surface dirt, and z-1 was a dug large room with fungus sapplings.
Say year 2 was my turn when I noticed this but did not do anything, this was dug prior to my turn with fungus tree growing. 
Fast forward to current save, year+1 after my turn, and I notice a fungus cap tree from up from the z-1, up through z+0, and tops at z+1 of the surface.

[NW_Kohaku]

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.