No. They do not exist only in our imagination and in the fairy tales that we read as children and continue reading in our adulthood, we can also find them in real life: wild forests in which human beings have barely stepped on . A recent study – which comes with a map that you can see in this article, below – shows that there is a surprising amount of this type of primary forest.
“What we have been able to show through this study is that, although the total forest area is not large in Europe, there are still many more virgin or primary forests than we thought , and they are widely distributed in many parts of the Old Continent” , explains Bill Keeton, a forest ecologist at the University of Vermont (United States), in a press release from this study center. “And wherever they are, they provide exceptional and unique ecological value and habitat for biodiversity,” adds Keeton.
This ecologist has been part of a team led by researchers from the Humboldt University of Berlin and that has created the first map of the last remaining wild forests in Europe. This map indicates more than 1.37 million hectares, spread over 34 different countries, including Spain – especially in the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian coast . The study has been published in the journal Diversity and Distributions .
The main author of the research, Francesco Maria Sabatini, a scientist at the Humboldt University, clarifies that “it is not that these forests have never been touched by human hands; since that would be something difficult to believe in Europe ”. “Even so, these are forests where there are no clearly visible indications that human activities have occurred. Perhaps these activities have been blurred after decades of non-intervention (of the human being in these places), in which ecological processes have followed a natural dynamic ”.
International collaboration, fundamental
Getting to compose this map required a lot of work, as they recognize. “We contacted hundreds of NGO forestry scientists, experts and activists from all over Europe, asking them to share information on where to find these forests in their respective countries,” adds Sabatini. “Without their direct participation, we would never have been able to build our database, which is the most comprehensive ever compiled for Europe, ” he stresses.
The study highlights that primary forests in Europe are quite rare, are located in areas far from populations and are fragmented into small patches . “The European landscape is the result of millennia of human activities, so it is not surprising that only a small fraction of our forests have yet to be disturbed,” says Tobias Kuemmerle, director of the Conservation Biogeography Laboratory at the Berlin University and also lead author of the study. “Although these forests only correspond to a small fraction of the total forest area in Europe, it is no less true that they are absolutely exceptional in terms of their ecological and conservation value,” he highlights.
According to the researchers who have carried out the study, these forests are important because they are usually safe areas for species that are in danger of extinction . In fact, scientists see them as natural laboratories in which to study the impact that people have on forest ecosystems. The research also reports that 89% of the mapped primary forest is in protected areas, but only 46% of this land is under strict protection. Having this map now can help to further protect these forest areas in Europe.
Mapa: Esri, HERE, Garmin, OpenStreetMap contributors and the GIS user community
