Status and future prospect of deregistered woodland key habitats in Northwestern Sweden

Extensive primary boreal forests within Europe are primarily located in Fennoscandia and northwestern Russia. These forests host numerous endemic and red-listed species but are rapidly being exploited and transformed to production forests that lack the habitat characteristics that are required for sustained biodiversity. Over the past 30 years, certain highly valuable areas within Swedish forests have been designated and registered as "woodland key habitats" (WKH) to be safeguarded from clear-cutting. However, despite their high conservation values, WKH lack proper legislative protection. Recently, many WKH were deregistered and thereby lost their potential protection against clear-cutting, jeopardizing biodiversity values in these forests. Moreover, the former way of classifying WKH has been criticized for being too lenient, making conventional forestry difficult. To assess the leniency of WKH registration and effect of WKH deregistration, we conducted a field inventory of WKH following a new inventory method proposed by the Swedish Forest Agency, featuring more stringent criteria for classification of WKH in north-western Sweden. The inventory was conducted in 9 still registered and 9 recently deregistered WKH to assess their conservation values. Our inventory results show that all 18 areas reach the criteria for WKH with the new method, despite higher, more stringent thresholds for conservation values. Hence, formerly registered WKH were not deregistered due to lower values. Moreover, analysis of recent harvest actions within deregistered WKH in Sweden showed that almost 1,200 hectares (~ 2%) of these areas were clear-cut or reported for clear-cutting 1-7 years post deregistration. As such, our results indicate that WKH contain high values, even using more stringent classification criteria, but also that deregistration of WKH does not consider these values and increases the risk of losing them to forest management. Given past and current declines in forest biodiversity, this is concerning, as conservation of areas containing high conservation values are needed, in order to preserve biodiversity in boreal forests.