Old-growth forests and veteran trees for biodiversity and resilient landscapes

RESILIENTREES objective is to increase the protection of nature and biodiversity, putting into practice novel strategies and policies for what concerns old-growth forests and veteran trees. Veteran trees are keystone structures, elements that have a disproportionate positive effect on the ecosystem where they occur. Climate change and land use intensification threaten veteran trees and their successors are becoming rare. Old-growth forests face similar threats in Europe, where they are rare, small, and fragmented, representing less than 3% of the total forest area. Even if in the last decades there have been substantial improvements in EU environmental policies, forest degradation is still a key problem and biodiversity loss continues at unprecedented rates.

To restore and preserve biodiversity and ecosystem functionality we need to work on the implementation of the new EU forest strategies, to effectively sustain more extensive networks of old-growth forests and veteran trees.