![]() ![]() Only a few countries conducted systematic, on-the-ground inventories 19, 23. Yet, many data gaps remain on the location and conservation status of EU’s primary forests 21, 22. Such data could inform both policy making and conservation planning, as well as research, for instance by highlighting areas where primary forests are either scarce, or poorly studied. Reaching these objectives requires complete and up-to-date data on primary forests’ location and protection status. In the newly released ‘Biodiversity Strategy for 2030’, the European Commission emphasized the need to define, map, monitor and strictly protect all of the EU’s remaining primary forests 2. Effective protection of Europe’s primary forests is therefore urgently needed 21. Widespread loss of primary forests also occurred in Ukraine 18, Slovakia 19, or in the boreal North, e.g., in the Russian North-West, where 4.6 Mha of primary forest were lost since 2001 13, 20. In Poland, the iconic Białowieża Forest was recently in the spotlight after the controversial decision from the Polish National Forest Holding, now nullified by the Court of Justice of the European Union 16, to implement salvage logging followed by tree planting after a bark beetle outbreak 17. ![]() This has resulted in significant primary forest loss, even within protected areas 13, 14, 15. For instance, Romania hosts some of the largest swaths of primary forest in Central Europe and faced a sharp increase in logging rates since 2000. As a result, despite the general trend of increasing total forest area, primary forests are scarce and continue to disappear 13. In Europe, as in many human-dominated regions, most forests are currently managed 10, often with increasing harvest intensities 11, 12. Finally, these forests are an irreplaceable part of our natural heritage, shape the cultural identities of local communities, and have a high intrinsic value 9. Third, primary forests often serve as a reference for developing close-to-nature forest management, or for benchmarking restoration efforts 8. At the global scale they contribute to climate stability by storing large quantities of carbon, both in the biomass and in soils 1, 6, 7. At the local scale, they buffer the adverse effects of increasing temperature on understory biodiversity, as they often have cooler forest-floor summer temperatures compared to secondary forests 5. Second, primary forests play an important role in climate change mitigation. First, they provide refuge to forest biodiversity 3, and act as a buffer to species loss in human-dominated landscapes 4. The importance of primary forests is widely recognized 1, 2. Although knowledge gaps remain, ours is the most comprehensive dataset on primary forests in Europe, and will be useful for ecological studies, and conservation planning to safeguard these unique forests. Using Landsat satellite-image time series (1985–2018) we checked each patch for possible disturbance events since primary forests were identified, resulting in 94% of patches free of significant disturbances in the last 30 years. When available, we provide information on each patch (name, location, naturalness, extent and dominant tree species) and the surrounding landscape (biogeographical regions, protection status, potential natural vegetation, current forest extent). Our geodatabase harmonizes 48 different, mostly field-based datasets of primary forests, and contains 18,411 individual patches (41.1 Mha) spread across 33 countries. Here, we present a comprehensive geodatabase and map of Europe’s known primary forests. Despite these losses, we know little about where these forests occur. Primary forests, defined here as forests where the signs of human impacts, if any, are strongly blurred due to decades without forest management, are scarce in Europe and continue to disappear. Scientific Data volume 8, Article number: 220 ( 2021) ![]()
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