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Comment by lithocarpus | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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