Governments sometimes skirt those regulations, anyway, and that’s already causing conflicts. Many of these areas that are already recorded don’t sit within areas governed by strict protections. In Slovakia’s Low Tatra mountains, the population of the western capercaillie bird dipped by 40 percent, concurrently with the destruction of 7,000 hectares of its habitat. His colleague Martin Mikoláš, a forest ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences, found that when the bird’s habitat in Slovakia’s Low Tatra mountains decreased by 7,000 hectares, the population plummeted by 40 percent. The western capercaillie bird, for instance, depends on “a mosaic dominated by old-growth, natural forests, mixed with bogs and younger successional stages,” Sabatini says. For animals that thrive in primeval forests, a changing landscape can be disastrous. “There’s a recent surge of interest on Europe’s remaining wild areas,” Sabatini says, and there are ecological reasons for pinpointing where they are and what protections insulate them. To begin to account for that, the researchers also modeled areas where they suspect that unrecorded forests are most likely to be. It’s quite possible that there are primary forests there that didn’t make it into the mix because the data wasn’t available. There was no data for Latvia, Belarus, Moldova, or Ireland, and just scattered snapshots for Sweden, Austria, or the U.K. “Some of the patterns that can be seen in the map derive from data availability, rather than reflecting the actual distribution of primary forests,” Sabatini says. Still, the authors caution that this is certainly only a partial picture of the distribution. Remote location and low density also makes it likely that the lumber industry hadn’t rumbled through town. So, unsurprisingly, these are small parcels-the median was 24 hectares, or roughly 0.09 square miles-largely scattered in northern latitudes, far from roads and among rugged terrain. Known primary forests account for just 0.7 percent of Europe’s forest area, discounting Russia, the scientists write in a new paper describing their results. Even where they’re most plentiful, these aren’t huge or especially numerous. When they analyzed that data, the researchers found that most of the primary forests-at least those for which they had records-sprouted in Finland, or on the Carpathian or Balkan mountain ranges that slice across Romania and Bulgaria. They reviewed 17 years’ worth of studies on primary forests, which they took to include any tracts that were “primeval, virgin, near‐virgin, old‐growth, long‐untouched.” Since focusing on utterly untrammeled forest would have yielded a very brief list, the team took a broader view. University of California Libraries/Public Domain In Kay Neilsen’s illustration of Hansel and Gretel, the forest feels unknown and unknowable. But they’re dwindling.Ī team of researchers, led by Francesco Maria Sabatini of Berlin’s Humboldt‐Universität, recently set out to map exactly where those oldest, least-disturbed forests are, and how many of them are left. ![]() ![]() Slivers of Europe are still luxuriant with trees, too, and very old ones at that. Still, dense clusters of primary forests-where trees have grown, for ages, largely undisturbed-exist in patches of the Amazon basin, Southeast Asia, and Canadian and Siberian Taiga. In 2018, they aren’t many truly unknown corners of the globe-few places are pristine and untraveled the way they might be described in a fairytale. Their allure, and a dash of horror, comes from the fact that they are unknown, and maybe unknowable. They are thick, tall, and deep-so much so that the young duo could wander them for days. In a glen, of course, sits that devilishly tasty house built from bread and cakes. On the ground, clusters of ferns unfurl around tree roots there are patches of grass, and verdant trees studded with blooms. Their canopies, crunchy and brown, blot out the sky. The trees are towering, gnarled, and knotted. In Kay Nielsen’s illustrations for the Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel, the deep woods are full of secrets. It’s increasingly rare to find a forest that hasn’t been shaped by human use.
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