The original Finnish article was published in Helsingin Sanomat, February 15, 1997

The threatened species living near the eastern border of Finland are a mere illusion, core populations dwell in Russia

by Jani Kaaro

The very last fragments of Finland`s old-growth forests have been mapped and researched keenly, but also with a great despair during the last few years.

It has been noticed little by little that the future of species depending on old-growth forests in Finland will likely be even worse than thought before.

The endangered forest species seem to have totally disappeared from southern and western parts of the country. There are some small old-growth forest areas with decaying wood and old giant trees left also in southern parts of Finland, but many rare forest species are compeletely missing.

Closer to the eastern border of Finland endangered species can be found even from forests which are not that good. For example, a group of beetle researchers visited some old-growth forests in the region of Kainuu last summer and found seven threatened beetle species there. A sample like that could hardly be collected from the forests of Southern Finland.

Many ecologists, however, believe that the endangered species which can be found from the eastern parts of Finland are only an illusion, which reflects much better state of old-growth forests in the Russian Karelian side of the border. Ecologists describe the situation with a source­sink model: core populations live in the larger old-growth forests of Russia and disperse from there to the fragments of Finland. Finland`s old-growth forests are so fragmented that they can't secure the survival of the species.

If the old-growth forests in Russian Karelia will also be fragmented, the whole Fennoscandia may loose most of its endangered flora and fauna.

According to the ecologists, time is a central term affecting the future of the species.

Professor Ilkka Hanski from the university of Helsinki emphasizes that species react only slowly to the devastation of their habitats. This is the reason why many endangered old-growth species are in Finland too common in relation to the present size of the old-growth forest areas."These species have not yet had time to reach the balance with the prevailing structure of their environment. Unfortunately for many species this balance will mean extinction", says professor Hanski.

He believes that a fairly large share of rare or threatened species will disappear from Finland if the old-growth forests' area won't increase considerably. These species represent the so called extinction debt. The ecologists have started to call these doomed populations as the living dead.

For example, a quarter of southern Finland's endangered beetle species can be found in Mustametsä, an old-growth forest fragment of 30 hectares, in the municipality of Mäntsälä. No one can quarantee that they will still live there after next 30 years.

The fast rate of the ecological change contributes to the increase of the extinction debt. Only 40 years ago Sten Stockmann collected rare beetles in Helsinki area. Now these beetles have disappeared from the whole Finland. The best known of these beetles was Ptiliolum stockmannii, which Sten Stockmann found from his own yard. This species have never again been reported from the whole world.

"The species must have been much widely distributed in those times", says researcher Erkki Laurikainen from the Finnish Environment Institute. But when the aspen forests disappeared, the populations declined and became prisoners of small forest islands, the winds of extinction wiped the Ptiliolum stockmannii from the face of the earth.

Although most of the old-growth forest species have already disappeared from western and southern Finland, that does't mean there is no more need to protect those old-growth forests which still exist. If the populations of the threatened species are to be restored, they need a extensive network of protection areas in order to spread from Russian Karelia back to western parts of the Fennoscandia.

This is why the greatest concern is the future of the old-growth forests of Russian Karelia. The government of the Karelia State needs western money and therefore they have let several Finnish timber companies to log their old-growth forests. The local people don't benefit notably from these loggings, because the Finnish companies don't employ them and the money flows elsewhere.

Also logging in the Finnish old-growth forests go on. Last autumn the Ministry of the Environment approved certain loggings in the municipality of Valtimo, which attracted international attention.

Environmental activists have been joking that the officers of the Ministry of Environment have not yet reached the balance with the prevailing state of the environment.

The Ministry of Environment is for example going to revise the red list of the endangered species by dropping some hundred species from the list, though according to the ecologists there is a need list to find room for a considerable number of new species. Many species which now may seem common, may crash totally within the next twenty years.

The Ministry of the Environment has been pleased to take the Ecological Landscape Plannings (ELP) by Forest and Park Service as a solution to the issue of old-growth forest protection.

ELP includes so-called softer forest management methods, in which key-biotopes are taken into account and ecological corridors are left as dispersal routes for animals. According to [professor] Ilkka Hanski [from the University of Helsinki, transl. note], Ecological Landscape Plans are a classical example of how the work of ecologists has been interpreted on wrong grounds, although partially in good faith.

"So far all EL-Plans have mainly been ecological phraseology", says Hanski.

He thinks that biggest mistake is to combine old-growth forest protection and ecological-landscape-loggings.

"You can`t protect old-growth forests by logging them down. Softly or not, the loggings causes only futher fragmentation of the forests."

Hanski emhasizes the fact that you shouldn`t bungle when carrying out the ELPs: the impacts can only be seen when it is too late and to correcting the situation will take hundreds of years. He finds it strange that Forest and Park Services is in such a hurry to put its own ELPs into practice, when the research of ELP hardly has begun in Finland.

Despite of this, Finland is exporting its ecological landscape know-how to Russian Karelia in the name of cooperation with neigbouring regions.

Forest companies importing timber from Russia asked for a forestry plan from Forestry Center of Kymi concerning Säkkijärvi area . Regional environmental authorities in southeastern Finland carried out surveys of nature values and, based on the surveys, a small part of area was left out of the loggings.

This way forest companies get both the timber and a nature friendly image. The whole Säkkijärvi area has been proposed to be protected. Minister of environment in Leningrad region, Mr. Juri V. Fovkin, recently proposed in a meeting held in Germany by a ministeral working group of experts that Säkkijärvi area shoul be included in the Green Belt of Fennoscandia - a protection network, which has been proposed to be included in UNESCO World Heritage programme.

Mr. Markku Ruokanen from the Forestry Centre of Kymi tells that the the logging permits for Säkkijärvi area are already being considered. After a Finnish-style ecological landscape forestry know-how Säkkijärvi area will hardly be worth of any protection programme.

>>> Green Belt main page

>>> Background of forest protection

Translation by the Finnish Nature League