Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhx | Hacker News Reader

"Forest" is a polite way to refer to what appears to be a monoculture plantation. To restore the land properly it would probably be necessary to remove 80%+ of the trees to make space for seeding or planting a diverse range of other species. Possibly 100% if the monoculture species already planted is not endemic.

Google street view imagery of the site showing logging completed by June 2026 and logs waiting collection: [1]

Sentinel-2 L2A imagery from 2026-10-11 showing the logged area: [2]

[1] https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/91500+Tahvola,+Finland/...

[2] https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=15&lat=64.8369...

View on HN

Assuming that you're correct and it is a monoculture plantation, they did not remove trees to make space for planting other species, they removed trees to make space for a data center.

If the translation is correct, Finland converted about 14,000 hectares of forest in the 2010s per year (without replacement), and cut about 173,000 hectares per year in general (with replacement).

I suspect how much people think this was an honest mistake with their 330 hectares (apparently following the forestry rules but missing EIA) will depend on people's priors.

1. https://ilmastopaneeli.fi/hallinta/wp-content/uploads/2025/1...

This is the correct way to frame it.

This is probably all native scots pine or norway spruce, as that is what almost all of finland's forests are, and they don't plant sitka spruce plantations there like they do in Ireland or other places in Europe.

That said, there's very little old growth forest in finland and this obviously is not old growth.

I'm curious though if you know, what other species you'd expect to see here if it was properly restored?

In parts of Australia there are designated "reference areas" which have a higher level of environmental protection than national parks. They are typically remote areas that humans do not visit and have not historically and directly disturbed. These areas are also typically less disturbed by other external factors such as seeding of non-endemic species by birds. Scientists use such areas as a reference to what other less protected areas of the environment would have looked like before human impact. In scientific journals you'll find surveys of such reference areas including the prevalence of different taxon, as well as surveys of national parks or other areas being compared.

I've tried to find similar for Finland. The closest I've found is [1] which maps "old forests" which are defined to be over 100 years old (not actually very old). The three examples [2], [3] and [4] are Google street view imagery of nearby "old forests" and all indicate a much higher biodiversity and natural planting than the site Google has cleared. The site Google has cleared and nearby forests are visible in overhead imagery as having a pattern of tree plantings (distinct rows/grid) and show visible disturbance for forestry trails (ground compaction), whereas the "old forest" sites don't have these patterns. The "old forest" sites also show variance in trunk diameters, greater separation between trunks, more forest floor diversity and more tree variety (both taxon and structure). Plantation forests have trees deliberately planted too close to each other to encourage upright growth habit, lower limbs are deliberately removed and trees thinned after some years, all to maximise the number of sawmill-ready trunks. Revegetation planting would look completely different to what occurred at the Google site.

Revegetation planting and ongoing management is also much more expensive to do correctly. It's a struggle to find success stories. Best examples likely involve aerial seeding and complex seed collection and preparation, as well as ongoing manual weed management and introduced species control for 20+ years. There is often a fair bit of complexity to simulating nature to make seeds viable--for example, refer to Przewalski's Horse case study where hoofed animals were reintroduced and found to be essential for embedding seeds at required depth and reshaping the terrain to support seed germination. More examples are water courses upstream having to be cleared of weeds first, introduced animals need to be excluded/culled, etc, etc.

[1] https://luontovahti.fi/vanhojametsia -- select Pohjois-Pohjanmaa as the area then zoom in near Muhos.

[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/wncKi2JMxuPXC7Bc7

[3] https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX2ta5dQmihSgVAM6

[4] https://maps.app.goo.gl/4W3WvR5tH9wroVna7

> In parts of Australia there are designated "reference areas" which have a higher level of environmental protection than national parks. They are typically remote areas that humans do not visit and have not historically and directly disturbed.

> I've tried to find similar for Finland. The closest I've found is [1] which maps "old forests" which are defined to be over 100 years old (not actually very old).

The history of civilization in Finland is much longer than the history of civilization in Australia. You shouldn't expect to be able to find "areas that humans have not historically disturbed" in most parts of the world. Certainly not in parts of the world that can grow trees.

Living on land with care and stewardship as indigenous peoples often did is very different to clear-felling for agriculture or monoculture forestry, the strongest plausible interpretation would be that by "directly disturbed", the GP meant the latter.

Actually the first Australians arrived here before any humans arrived in Europe.

Thanks, that's interesting. I mostly agree. I'm not sure the dominant tree species would vary much, as Finland's forests, both old growth and managed, are mostly scots pine, norway spruce, and birch -- which looks to be what we see here in both the old forest and the trees around the edge of what Google cleared.

Definitely an older forest will have more complexity and thus diversity of understory etc.

I imagine a lot of the beneficial aspects of old forest, e.g. structural complexity, snags and downed logs, canopy gaps where trees fell, etc will develop on their own given time, in many of Finland's managed/logged forests. I think this is what we see in the "old forest" examples. And it is what I've seen in the areas I've lived in the USA. And, humans can try to help these things develop sooner, which like you say is often expensive and complex.

Some places like California, eucalyptus will come in and completely take over some forested areas after they're cleared, and so it won't naturally become like old native forest again. I don't think they have something quite like that in Finland but I'm curious if they do. I don't know what will happen with these patches of eucalyptus in another few hundred years if humans don't intervene.

I can tell you that this is, for better or worse, what a lot "forests" look like in Sweden (and I assume, Finland too). A large part of our forests are industriskog (industrial forest).

Great for the economy (in the short term), not great for biodiversity.

Swede here too.

It's extremely depressing driving around in Swedens countryside now. There are little to no forests, it's all just tree plantations.

It is so sad, same in Finland, just one huge plantation.

Still better than most of Europe. Tree plantation has more biodiversity than French or German field growing wheat.

This one was probably planted up to 60 years ago after the previous felling. The biodiversity requirements surely were not any better back then.

Either way, you need to complete the EIA. It'd probably show that this was, indeed, a good location for a DC. Not doing the assessment before starting to chop down the trees is the problem here, not that the forest is particularly ecologically valuable.

Finn here. Not really. You're allowed to log if you resow.

So this seems to be a calculated move: When permits pass, prep is done. Worth paying minor fines for jumping the gun. Permits don't pass, just resow. That's a well informed expected value calculation.

That's a bad calculation, if the risk model failed to account for a political scandal in a small country that's very proud of their tree plantations and deeply suspicious of megacaps. But even with that tail risk realizing the likely outcome is that permits pass and prep is done. People make some noise, you get some bad PR and pay more than anticipated. Might seem like not worth the costs in retrospect, but hardly a disaster.

'"Forest" is a polite way to refer to what appears to be a monoculture plantation.' That would mean that Europe almost has no Forest according to you and there's nothing worth protecting?

There is, but the amount of primary forests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest ) is much lower than the amount of plantations

That's my point ;)

Pretty much yes, say Germany and Britain cut down almost all of the forests that were not too steep to farm on centuries ago, which make their cries to other parts of the world to stop deforestation pretty hypocritical.

Because they can't learn out of their own lessons? That's not hypocrisy

I don't see Britain or Germany setting the goal to reforest to even the current Brazilian cover %, therefore the lesson doesn't seem to be learned.

Pretty lame trolling attempt.

Illegal is illegal, it doesn't mater what google street view looks like.

So this was like a tree farm, planted for the purpose of logging? I know we have areas like that here in the PNW of the US, don't know about Finland.

Finland is 75% covered with forrest out of which 97% is grown for the purpose of logging. This AI slop research, but it’s in the ballpark.

From the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry[0]:

> More than 75% of Finland’s land area is covered with forest. [...] About 3 million hectares of Finnish forests are protected or under restricted use, which represents 13% of the total surface area of forests (forest land and low-productive forests). The area of protected forests fully excluded from fellings is 2.5 million hectares, which represents 10.8% of the total surface area of forest and low-productive forest land.

[0] https://mmm.fi/en/forests/forestry/forest-resources

The whole controversy here is that some of what Google cut down was those very rare pieces of native (and protected) forests

Monoculture plantation does not imply "planted for the purpose of logging". It implies originally planted for some reason.

For trees it definitely does imply "planted for the purpose of logging". That's more than 95% of what people want from trees.

Most of Finland's forests are planted. Some of that is for logging but also some of that is for conservation purposes. In Finland, all planted forests are native species.

But the whole controversy here is that they cut down some of the rare native old-growth forests. That's the part environmental groups are most upset about

What you call "monoculture plantation" looks just typical Finnish planted forest to me. I mean sure, it's not in its natural state, but I wouldn't call it a "monoculture plantation" either. Plenty of wildlife and species live in these forests. The species are endemic, non-endemic trees are only planted in cities, private property and such for their looks.

There are moose, bears, wolves, foxes, rabbits and so on living in these "monoculture plantations".

You're clearly not familiar with native forests wherever ice sheets retreated and the soil is rich. These conditions naturally tend towards a "monoculture" (at least at the canopy level). The understory and soil and ecosystems are still extremely rich

Reply on news.ycombinator.com