Throstur Eysteinsson is a biologist and forester and director of development for the Icelandic Forest Service. His responsibilities include directing management of the state-owned forests, planning and policy.
Briefly, what’s Iceland’s forest history?
Iceland was completely glaciated in the last ice age, so any vegetation has arrived here since then, more or less by chance. Our native woody vegetation is dominated by downy birch, and we also have rowan, willow and aspen. There are no conifers except juniper. From the sagas and pollen studies, we think that 30% of Iceland was wooded at the time of human settlement 1100 years ago.
The people arriving were farmers and they brought livestock, clearing the forests for pasture. They also cut trees to make charcoal for bog iron, and sheep grazing prevented regeneration. By around 1900 we were down to only 1% tree cover and in 1907 the Icelandic Forest Service was established. Since then, despite decreasing pressure on the woods for fuel, the sheep have still prevented regeneration.
What forest restoration has been done?
In the early 1900s the main efforts involved fencing out sheep. We have no deer, hares, rabbits or voles so excluding sheep is enough as native birch recolonises quickly if there is a seed source nearby. In the 1950s there was more emphasis on planting, mostly with exotic conifers, Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine and Siberian larch, because there was a prevalent impression that birch is useless as timber.
It is possible to restore many of the ecosystem functions of a forest using exotic species: they support the same birds, the same lichens, and the same ground vegetation as birchwoods. For example, larch does much better on highly eroded ground than birch; where we would only get birch scrub, larch will grow into trees and provide many of the functional elements of a natural forest. When you are working with such degraded land, anything that increases nutrient cycling is a good thing.
In the 1990s we introduced afforestation grant schemes for farmers and volunteers. Nowadays people are more sensitive to not using exotics, so native birch is now around 30% of what is planted. In addition, keeping sheep is no longer so economically viable and sheep numbers are declining, so regeneration of native woodland is happening naturally. Our tree cover is now up to 1.4% of the land area, of which 1.2% is native, with 0.2% exotic plantations.
Does the restoration include animals?
It is mostly tree planting. Trees are the scaffolding of the ecosystem and we find that forest floor species and lichens develop naturally. We do not have any native mammals associated with woods. Birds and other animals like insects arrive by themselves.
Are any of your methods unique to Iceland?
We are working with some land that is highly eroded, rather like parts of China, Africa and Central Asia. These are wet deserts, with no ecosystem components at all. Restoration on such sites has required a great deal of research. We have found that providing fertiliser and mycorrhizal fungi in a slurry allows tree seedlings to start growing, providing the scaffolding that soon starts to attract other life. In 2–3 years, well before it is functioning as a forest, invertebrates appear that help with nutrient cycling, but it all takes a long time to build up.
In some places we take turf from existing woodlands and use it to create seed islands to plant birch in, thereby introducing mycorrhizal fungi and so on. These are rather recent experiments so it is too early to say how successful they have been.
Who are the major players involved?
The government plays the largest role by providing funding. The farmers’ grant scheme is run by smaller regional afforestation projects, and voluntary planting is run by an NGO, the Icelandic Forestry Association, an umbrella organisation for 57 local forest societies that get local communities involved in forest restoration.
There is a system of summer work schools where teenagers aged from 13 to 15 get work experience by tree planting close to towns and villages. These will be recreation forests and the young people will take their own children to them when they grow up. So it is a way of restoring a woodland culture among the population at the same time as restoring the forest. I think that this is a very postive scheme and good at promoting the participation of local communities and NGOs.
Some environmental NGOs are critics of the forest restoration work. What we see as degraded land and target for forest restoration, they see as land that is is home to birds like wimbrels and plovers, and reforestation as damaging their habitat. I think that the question is one of scale. Realistically, we are only looking at doubling tree cover from 1.4% to 3% over the next 50 years, and we are monitoring impacts on birds.
What is the key to success?
Putting infrastructure in place. People need tree nurseries, roads, access to the land, and even tools. If you do not make sure people get a spade, then nothing happens.
Do you exchange knowledge with others?
We collaborate mostly with Scandinavians and our emphasis on planting is probably due to them. We have community friendship schemes with Nordic countries, and have had some technical exchanges with Scotland. We watch others make mistakes and then we make them too! We are no better at this than anyone else.
What are the biggest constraints on ecological restoration?
The main constraint used to be the lack of land, because farmers wanted to use it all for sheep grazing. Now that land is more readily available, the constraint is economic. In most places seed sources are not available for regeneration, so we need to plant and that costs money. There are fewer than 300,000 people in Iceland, and the 30% of the land suitable for afforestation is about the size of similarly suitable land in Scotland. There simply is not the money, nor the people, to do the work. Also, even though sheep grazing has reduced in scale, in summer sheep range freely and it does not take many sheep to prevent any tree regeneration.
What is your vision for the future?
My vision is for a change of land-use practices that will allow the natural regeneration of birchwoods. If we fenced sheep in, rather than fencing them out, that would greatly help our woodlands to regenerate. |
