Europe’s last wilderness threatened

Green world: The presence of decaying trees in primeval and unmanaged woodlands is an important factor in supporting biodiversity. (Photo: Ralf Lotys/Wikipedia.) After the end of the last glacial period around 11,700 years ago, forests took over most of Europe, replacing the tundra and steppe and reconquering the land that had been covered by glaciers. Over the last three millennia, Europeans have cleared away the majority of these forests to create space for agriculture, then for towns, cities and infrastructure. Only a few fragments survive today, now known as primeval forests, or ancient woodlands. The largest patch of the primeval European lowland forest that still exists is the Białowie . za forest, which has been a Unesco World Heritage site since 1979 and part of the EU’s Natura 2000 ecological network since 2004. It straddles the border between Poland and Belarus and covers 1,500 square kilometres, which isn’t all that much — the Greater London administrative area is slightly larger. Wooded mountainsides are still widespread in other parts of Eastern Europe, such as the Carpathian montane conifer forests in Romania, as well as forests in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the Caucasus area. Ancient woodlands in Western Europe are much smaller, with the largest areas in France, for instance, covering no more than 25 square kilometres. Old growth forests, with their natural mixture of young, old, and decaying trees and with a diversity of species, offer habitat to a much wider range of animals than managed woodlands. Ecosystem services include carbon storage, air and water purifi cation, soil maintenance, pest control, and climate control. The recent recovery of some of Europe’s larger mammalian species including European bison, beaver and lynx (Curr. Biol. (2013) 23, R939–R943), has been facilitated by the presence of these last refuges of undisturbed nature. Conservationists and proponents of rewilding (Curr. Biol. (2014) 24, R1067– R1070) have been hoping that these forests could be the nuclei to grow more wilderness in a post-industrial European landscape, where space isn’t as desperately needed as it once was. Recently, however, the trend seems to have gone in the opposite direction, with the current Polish government scaling up logging operations at Białowie . za forest, while Romania fails to control illegal harvesting from its forests.