Guest Lecture at the Faculty of Forest & Environment

Dr. Helmut Volk from the Forest Research Institute Freiburg held a highly regarded lecture on 'Cultural Forests of Europe' at the HNEE on 14.10.2022. In the center of his remarks were recent landscape-historical-vegetation-scientific research results that numerous Central European forests have already been strongly changed by human settlement and use history for two to three thousand years, thus representing 'cultural forests'. It can therefore by no means be assumed, says Volk, that the main clearing activity in the forests, especially from the Middle Ages onwards, came from beech-dominated 'virgin forests'. Rather, it is precisely the blending of agriculture and tree use that played a crucial role in landscape transformation long before the birth of Christ.