Nation's woodland area expanding

A new survey of Danish woodland area has rated the woods near Silkeborg as the nation's largest protected woodland. The forest planting push of recent years has led many smaller woodlands in the Silkeborg area to merge together - and the forestland now spans an area of 85 square kilometers, surpassing Rold Skov as the most expansive, continuous woodland in the country.

Director Hans Henrik Christensen of the National Forest and Nature Council, which authored the new study, expects the Silkeborg woods to keep on growing. While woodland immediately south of Silkeborg has already overtaken the top spot on Denmark's list of large forests, the woods surrounding Silkeborg Lake are expected to merge together within a matter of years. The growth development around Silkeborg will result in more than 125 square kilometers of continuous woodland - an area not seen in Denmark for centuries.

In 1989, Parliament passed a resolution to double Denmark's woodland area within a single forest generation - or 80-100 years. Back then, roughly 10 percent of Denmark's total area was composed of protected woodland. Today, that figure is approaching 12 percent.

"Things aren't moving quite as quickly as planned, although planting efforts have generally accelerated," said Hans Henrik Christensen, who is nonetheless pleased that the country has surpassed the 500,000-hectare mark for woodland.

According to Christensen, planting forests is costly and time-consuming.

"Copenhagen's West Forest is a good example of the time involved in raising a new forecast. It's taken 30 years to bring the woodland to near-completion. There are just a couple of small seedling areas left in the middle before we can officially say that we've grown a brand-new 1400-hectare forest. One problem is that we have to buy land on the free market, so it all depends on when land is available for sale," said Christensen, who believes the one-fifth of Denmark set to be composed of forestland by the end of this century may not be covered only with trees.

"I don't think Danes want the kind of huge, uninterrupted forests you see in Sweden. On the contrary, I think people are inclined to keep a lot of open areas - more nature areas than actual forests. Open areas with grass or marshland would offer greater variation for plant and animal life in the area," said Christensen.

Denmark felled virtually all of its original forestland before the first nature protection laws were passed in 1805. At that time, just two percent of the country was covered by woodland, at which time authorities prohibited farmers from letting their livestock graze in forests, and passed laws requiring new woods to be planted each time a forest was cut down.

The National Forest and Nature Council defines a forest as a natural or manmade plant community in which trees are the dominant flora, or will become the dominant flora.