The Central European Vegetation as the Result of Millennia of Human Activity

Abstract

Central Europe is an ancient cultural landscape, in which not even the smallest of areas has remained in what we can call a natural state. The sharp boundaries between forest, plantations, pastures, meadows and crop fields that are so characteristic of Central Europe today (see Fig. 3.1) are all the work of man. Even the areas that appear to be ruled by the forces of nature have usually also been influenced by humans in one way or another. Many so-called primeval forests, such as the ‘Neuenburger Urwald’ near Bremen and the Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland, show traces of earlier use (see Falinski 1980; Pott and Hüppe 1991; Pott 1999). Particularly the gnarled, spreading old trees that look so primeval are actually the result of earlier grazing with cattle, horses, goats and pigs, which kept down the undergrowth and opened up the forest (see Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). Today, there are only a few small fragments left of these once widespread wood-pastures (Glaser and Hauke 2004). Since they have been put under nature conservation and grazing management stopped, shade-tolerant trees have shot upwards and quickly overshadowed the venerable wide-crowned oaks and hornbeams. In terms of tree form, the slender-stemmed, high forest of modern forestry, forced upwards by competition, probably provides a better idea of most natural Central European forests than these ‘primeval’ forests and other protected former wood-pastures.