Scoping document: information related to European old growth forests - ETC/BD Working paper N°B/2015

01 Dec 2015

Iulian Petchesi


The main objectives of this document are to review the concept of old growth forest (and other related terms) in Europe and present in a synthetic and standardized way the information currently available in the EEA33 countries. As a result, a catalogue of the data/datasets/projects/initiatives/maps related to old growth forests in Europe is provided.

The scoping document is structured in the following chapters. Chapter 2 reviews the definitions of the term in a broad sense and briefly describes the used methodology. The presentation of available information is structured in a geographical manner. Thus, the following chapters comment the data/datasets (and existing definitions) first at the Pan-European scale (Chapter 3) and then in each of the European regions: Scandinavian (Chapter 4), Baltic (Chapter 5), Central and Eastern (Chapter 6), Mediterranean (Chapter 7) and Atlantic (Chapter 8). The chapters 4 and 6 are mainly based on the work made by ETC/BD partners SLU and AOPK respectively. Chapter 9 draws some conclusions and proposes a way-forward. Annexes 1 to 7 display the catalogue of available information in standardized forms and with the same geographical structure than the chapters. Countries within each region are presented in alphabetical order. Lastly, Annex 8 shows some additional references that were found in the bibliographical review.


Prepared by: Celia García Feced (from ETC/BD-MNHN, FR), Håkan Berglund (from ETC/BD partner SLU, SE) and Martin Strnad (from ETC/BD partner AOPK, CZ)