Forests

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Forests

Almost half of Estonian territory is under forest and woodlands; the area of forest stands has more than doubled during last half of the past century and is still growing.
Estonia is situated on a transitional area where the coniferous Euro-Siberian taiga opens onto a European zone of deciduous forests - or so called boreo-nemoral zone.

As an historical heritage from times when majority of forests were owned by german landlords and churches, today almost half of forests belongs to the state. This makes conservation efforts sometimes easier avoiding negotiations with different owners and huge compensations to be paid for lost income. Private forests are under much stronger felling pressure and forests of great ecological value can be saved mainly in protected areas. Soviet regime seemed to be a bit more favourable for Estonian forests than market economy - amount of timber yielded was three to four times smaller than nowadays.

Rules of financial world have been introduced suddenly to Estonian forests. To be creditworthy, forestry has to maintain year-around operations while in late Soviet era forest operations were interrupted in spring and early summer. Modern harvesters can cut old stands off incredibly quickly, they waken up hibernating bears and take off trees together with birds nests in the breeding season.

Big number of large carnivores, like the Bear, Lynx and Wolf still indicates rather natural ecological condition of Estonian forest ecosystems. Although may be not as many as 1000, as estimated by over-enthusiastic hunters, there are still hundreds of lynx dwelling in the large forests of Estonia, together with 200 wolves and more than 500 brown bears. Big forest tracts are home to an animal found in few other parts of Europe, the Flying Squirrel.

One bird species can be regarded as an indicator of the ecological health of forests - White-backed Woodpecker is still quite common in Estonian forests although it can never seen frequently - this quiet bird with inconspicuous behaviour needs quite large territories of natural forests with lot of decaying deciduous trees. White-backed Woodpecker is on the verge of extinction in Sweden and Finland where the forest management is too intensive.