Focus on Karelian Isthmus Forests

An ancient highway of species between Russia and Finland. Part of world widely poorly protected southern taiga. Long history of strongly - thanks to numerous successive wars and raids - varied anthropogenic influence. All this raises questions of the present nature conservation significance of Karelian Isthmus forests. The answers will be found by footwork on the field.

In June, July 2004 we spent a busy and harsh, but still very rewarding month surveying Karelian Isthmus forests, with an idea to locate some of the best old-growth forest cores of the region and define the natural state of the forests surrounding them. This first phase of a - hopefully - longer project was carried out as a joint operation between the Finnish Nature League and our colleagues in St. Petersburg, the Grinhipp NGO. The project was carried out cheap and swiftly: the core staff consisted of one forestry and conservation expert from the Finnish side plus two Grinhipp experts representing expertise in conservation, botanical and environmental education. In addition to this, several Grinhipp members took part in the field expeditions.

Due to limited time and money available, we chose the destinations of our expeditions on basis of the results of earlier inventories on the Isthmus. So we selected the Smorodinka-Termolovsky highlands on the south-central part of Isthmus - an important part of the Karelian Isthmus proposed national park in the early 90's (never became reality); the Tiuri region by the old run of the river Vuoksa; and the proposed Karelskij Les (Karelian Forest) conservation area bordering Finland in the very north-westernmost part of the Leningrad region.

And what did we find out? In a large scale the human impact on the forests can still be seen almost everywhere. Forests filling the strict Russian criteria for natural old-growth forests are - except some very small patches - virtually non-existing on the Isthmus. In this plays very important role the former use of prescribed burning of forests to create temporary agricultural land - for which the share of spruce in the forests is unnaturally low in many parts of the Isthmus; the use of small-leaved trees for burning coal - for example in the Smorodinka-Termolovsky the share of spruce is unnaturally high; the battles and fortification work of WW II; and also latter commercial loggings.


However, the coverage of natural-like forests - in other words forests that harbour several features of those found in the intact natural forests, though not all of them - was high on most areas we surveyed. On dry land these forests could be compared with those among the best of southernmost Finland, excluding the few real top forests in Finnish southern taiga. There is one significant difference between Finland and the Isthmus: in the Southern Finland's natural-like forests the missing feature is often the abundance of decaying wood, whereas on Isthmus there is plenty of deadwood in the forests. On the contrary, the structure and specie-composition of the tree-stand is in many cases more natural in the Finnish side natural-like forests than in those we saw on the Isthmus. Common for the both areas is, that in many cases the continuity of deadwood - existence in the forests has at some point been broken. In the few places we found signs of possible unbroken continuity, it was mostly question of spruce, in some cases also of birch or aspen.

Moving onto paludified forest land, swamps, mires, bogs, fens and alluvial forests, the Isthmus suddenly becomes superior in comparison to the Southern Finland. While the wetlands on the Finnish side have been under severe devastation during the last decades, the percentage of ditched wetland on the Isthmus has remained low. Our expeditions took mostly place on water-divide areas, where we found plenty of natural state spruce mires, pine-bogs, alluvial small-leaved forests on banks of unspoiled rivers, spring water fens and large open fens on raised bogs.

Probably the most unique were, though, the Tiuri forests. These stony, birch-dominated - with mixture of aspen and black alder - forests can be considered primary succession forests, because they grow on the river bed of the old run of the Vuoksa. They are also an important habitat for white-backed woodpecker. Among the other significant observations of the Isthmus fauna we took on our expeditions, were the habitats of the flying squirrel - considered a rare specie on Isthmus - at both Termolovsky and Karelskij Les areas.


In the absence of large intact forested areas, the backbone of future nature conservation of southern taiga lies in natural-like forests. In this helps - thanks to their southern location and in many places fertile soil - their relatively quick ability to recover after human influence. They are also naturally more specie-rich than forests situated at more northern latitudes. Recognition and locating of potentially most
valuable habitats takes a lot more footwork - like ours - than in regions where the basic work can be done using satellite images.


Writing this, the results of our project still remain partly unanalysed. Most of them will appear in the form of digital photo-archive and maps, completed with written descriptions. Anyway, it looks obvious that they can be used by the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) as well as the Russian officials in the GAP Analysis project in Northwest Russia.

Text & photos:
Jyri Mikkola
Finnish Nature League
e-mail: jyri.mikkola@sll.fi

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