Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Currently, most of the world’s forests are directly or indirectly affected by some kind of
human activity. More people are getting concerned with the state of tropical forests.
However, the international community has not tracked the rate and extent of ecological
change in forests of the boreal zone, which is the largest biome in the world and
comprise one-third of the world's forest area. Although European temperate forests
were transformed centuries ago, there are still some large areas of forest in a relatively
natural state left in boreal regions of Russia, Canada, Finland and Sweden. Five years
ago, a team of Russian experts associated with non-governmental environmental
organisations started to create new maps of Europe's last remaining wilderness forests,
using high-resolution satellite images in combination with GIS, existing topographical
maps and field work. The result of their effort, “The Last Intact Forest Landscapes of
Northern European Russia”, was released by the World Resources Institute's Global
Forest Watch (GFW) project and Greenpeace Russia in October 2001. The maps were
created also for the rest of Russia and the “Atlas of Russia’s Intact Forest Landscapes”
was released early in 2002.
The project “Mapping of Intact Forest Landscapes in Sweden” was initiated by GFW in
May 2002. The GFW Pan-Boreal Mapping Initiative originated as an idea to extend the
unique Atlas of Russia’s Intact Forest Landscapes (Aksenov et al. 2002) over the
World’s entire boreal zone. A number of non-governmental organizations and academic
institutions in five countries (Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Canada) were
involved in creating a map of “Remaining Wildlands in the Northern Forests” as the first
result of their cooperation. The map was presented as a poster at the Johannesburg
Summit 2002 (26th August - 4th September 2002).
This MSc thesis describes the background context of mapping undisturbed forests in
Sweden, as well as the criteria and methods set by the initiating GFW project. Swedish
forest conditions are partially covered in the Literature survey chapter, where the
history of forest management and the natural characteristics of northern boreal forests
are characterised. Previous works about mapping virgin forests in Sweden and related
studies dealing with remotely sensed data are mentioned. The essence of the study
focuses on the detailed description of the methodology (GIS in combination with the
interpretation of satellite data) and the material used to create the map of intact forest
landscapes in Sweden. Further, the comparison with other existing old-growth
inventories can be found in the Discussion part, where also the significance of the
output and the applicability of the Russian criteria to the Swedish vegetation conditions
are evaluated.