A long-term study co-funded ForestPaths, involving researchers from CREAF, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Centre de Ciència i Tecnologia Forestal de Catalunya (CTFC) and the Technical University of Munich, has found that Natura 2000 protection significantly reduces forest harvesting but has no detectable effect on the occurrence of wildfires or drought-driven dieback. 

The study compared disturbance patterns inside and outside Natura 2000 sites in Catalonia (NE Spain) over nearly four decades. The team combined satellite-derived disturbance maps from the European Forest Disturbance Atlas (EFDA, 1985–2023), an exhaustive ground survey of drought-induced dieback from the DEBOSCAT project (2012–2023) and forest structure data from roughly 3,400 plots surveyed across three Spanish National Forest Inventories (1990, 2000 and 2015). 

Across the full study period, wildfires and harvesting together affected 20.1% of Catalonia's forest area, with harvesting accounting for 58.6% of this disturbed area and wildfires 41.4% — a far higher share for fire than the 7% reported for natural disturbances across Europe as a whole in earlier work using the same atlas. Harvesting occurrence and intensity were both significantly lower inside Natura 2000 areas than outside: harvesting affected 19.2% of protected forest plots compared with 26.1% of non-protected ones (based on inventory comparisons) and protected forests had lower basal area removal (27.6% vs. 32.2%). 

By contrast, neither wildfire occurrence nor drought-driven dieback differed significantly between protected and non-protected forests. Wildfire incidence was instead explained mainly by bioclimatic region, being notably lower in montane areas. Drought-driven dieback, monitored separately from 2012–2023, affected 10.6% of total forest area, was more common in montane forests and less common in needleleaf stands, and showed no relationship to prior harvesting intensity. Strikingly, dieback events over this period affected an area (119,988 ha) comparable to the combined area burned and harvested over the same 12 years (122,178 ha), with a sharp increase in 2021–2023 accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total dieback area recorded since 2012. 

The authors note that while differences in harvesting between protected and non-protected forests were statistically significant, the resulting differences in forest structure (for example, only a 16% difference in mean basal area between protected and non-protected stands in the most fire-prone bioclimatic regions) were likely too small to meaningfully alter wildfire risk or drought vulnerability. They conclude that current harvesting intensities, irrespective of protection status, appear insufficient to curb drought-driven dieback and suggest that additional adaptation measures, such as promoting more drought-tolerant tree species and genotypes, may be needed alongside management approaches like close-to-nature forestry or fire-smart silviculture. 

Read the full study here.