Primary and old-growth forests are ancient forests which have developed largely without any human interaction and are home to numerous species not found elsewhere, remaining only in the wildest regions of Europe. It might sound surprising, but we still don’t know exactly where these forests are – and when they aren’t officially mapped, they cannot be protected, and logging is threatening these sites.
But since these old forests need centuries to develop, their protection is essential if we want to safeguard these systems and the unique biodiversity which they support. So the Forest Beyond Borders (FBB) is an exciting, ambitious, and truly important project in terms of European conservation, where we aim to develop and apply a scientific and systematic approach to map primary and old-growth forests across the Western Balkan region. It is an international collaboration between primary forest experts, regional scientists and NGOs.
Although we’ve been researching the old-growth forests of the region for the past ten years, local knowledge is absolutely crucial for the success of the project. This month, we brought together some of the most experienced regional scientists researching old-growth forests and the FBB NGO partners in Sarajevo for our first Scientific Advisory Board meeting to discuss methodology to map and field inventory of old-growth forests across the four nations. We received crucial feedback from the researchers, including information on where these forests most probably still remain – remote mountain ranges with difficult terrain that acted as a defence for these forests for centuries. In this digital age, meeting face-to-face facilitates another level of intimacy, understanding and debate, and the meeting was an essential step towards finalising proposed methodology, so that we can be ready by May to kickstart the surveys across the region.
