Europe
Map 1 shows the distribution of forests in Europe by type. There were five main types of forest, the most abundant being the evergreen needleleaf forest and the deciduous broadleaf forest, with the mixed broadleaf/needleleaf forests being abundant in the Iberian Peninsula and Greece. The Stockholm Environment Institute data were used for many of the countries in Europe and where national data for forest distribution were used, as in Switzerland, the SEI data were used as an overlay to classify the forests. The conversion of the SEI forest types to the types used for the present study, resulted in the distribution of types in Map 1. This had disadvantages because for example the block of forest stretching across Norway, Sweden and Finland became one type, with a little of another type in the very south of Sweden and Norway. Both the pine/spruce with birch and the pine/spruce with oak/birch were converted to evergreen needleleaf forest. There did not seem a good argument for converting one to the mixed broadleaf/needleleaf category and the other to the evergreen needleleaf, so they were lumped into the former. This decision should be re-examined for any further iteration of this study. In the event of a further study it is probable that the classification function of the SEI dataset will be replaced by more detailed data from national sources and this particular problem will not arise.
In much of Europe the most forested areas are the mountains. The Carpathians support both deciduous broadleaf forest and evergreen needleleaf forest, the latter in the higher zones. The Alps have evergreen needleleaf mainly, but the forests in Switzerland have been mainly classified as mixed. Italy's Apennines support mainly deciduous broadleaf forest, as does the Massif Cantral of France. The Pyrenees support all three: mixed, deciduous broadleaf and evergreen needleleaf. The higher areas of the Iberian Meseta support all forest types on the map except the deciduous needleleaf.
The ecological zones of Europe according to Holdridge are shown on Map 2. They range from subtropical to polar types. The cool temperate moist forest zone covers much of Europe, and is one zone that much of Europe's forest has been cut down in. The sparsely forested area in the Ukraine is in the cool temperate steppe region and therefore probably never had much forest.
Countries with the most forest in Europe were Finland and Sweden (Table 1, Fig. 2). Those with the least were, predictably, the small republics of Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino. Table 1 showed a forest area that was not assigned a country code by the Digital Chart of the World in the analysis: these forests were generally where DCW had gaps for lakes, and the forest coverage extended into where according to DCW there was lake. This was caused by resolution differences in the datasets as well as anomalies from conversion from one projection to another. The highest percentage protection of forests was in Cyprus (33%, Fig.2), and there were 17 out of the 43 countries that had ten or more percent protected (decimals rounded up). There were 16 countries with less than 5% protected, of which five were in "western Europe": Denmark, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Sweden. Rather than reflecting the real situation, this may be an anomalous result brought about by incomplete datasets for protected areas.
Fig. 1 shows the distribution of the forest cover in Europe into the different forest types. Most forest in Europe was of the evergreen needleleaf type, and although this was partly due to the classification of nearly all the forest in Finland, Sweden and Norway into this class, it still indicates that the forest types in these three countries together comprised much of the forest in Europe (one third, from Table 1). Sclerophyllous dry forests were 18% protected, the highest of all five types; mixed needleleaf/broadleaf forest had the lowest percentage protection at 4.3%.
Most countries had some of the two more abundant forest types, evergreen needleleaf forest and deciduous broadleaf forest (Table 2). Only one country, Switzerland, had deciduous needleleaf forest, and more than 10% of this was under protection. The Mediterranean countries supported the sclerophyllous dry forest type, which was only completely unprotected in Greece. These countries as well as Switzerland supported the mixed needleleaf/broadleaf forest type, which was protected in all countries although minimally in Italy and Greece. This class had the highest occurrence of forest without a country code attached.
The cool temperate moist forest ecological zone had more forest than any other zone (Fig.3, Table 3). It was however the biggest zone in Europe (Table 4). Ecological zones with no protected forest were warm temperate desert bush and subtropical moist forest (Fig. 3, Table 3). Of the 20 ecological zones, six had ten or more percent (rounded to no decimal places) protected. The deciduous needleleaf forest, which was shown only to occur in Switzerland, occurred in six ecological zones and was protected in all but one.
In an attempt to impartially indicate natural, undisturbed forest variants which may be under the most immediate threat of destruction, a list was drawn up that pinpointed those under 100 km2 in extent with none protected. These are variants of relatively limited extent and which do not even have any legal protection; possibly much less actual protection. Some of these forest variants may indeed be truly rare and unprotected types, others are clearly fragments of forest at the end of their ranges, as for example certain types of dry forest should not normally occur in moist ecological zones, or vice versa. An in-depth analysis of these forest variants is outside the scope of this study. There were 4 of the 69 variants in Europe that met these criteria, and these are listed below (T=tropical forest type, N=non-tropical forest type):
Table 4 shows that the all except one of the "forest" ecological zones had more than 20% of their area covered with forest. The highest percentages were for the boreal moist forest and boreal wet forest zones (74% and 65% respectively). The percentages of the zones covered by protected foest were much less in general, the highest being 9% in the polar wet tundra, which was 47% forested.
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