Afforestation on a Nationwide Scale
By Kirk Johnson
When Vikings braved the treacherous icy waters of the Norwegian Sea and North Atlantic Ocean to settle the 40,000-square-mile island of Iceland (about the same land area as the state of Kentucky) during the late 800s and early 900s, they did find some forests upon arrival. Perhaps as much as forty percent of the island, primarily in the lowland and coastal areas, was covered with dense thickets of brushy forest.
Even though there had been little to no human habitation of Iceland prior to the Vikings’ arrival, however, these forests were not composed of towering stands of stout-boled old-growth trees, ripe for use in the manufacture of construction timbers, masts, or planking for longships. By far, the dominant tree was downy birch (Betula pubescens), which in Iceland has a crooked growth form and rarely achieves more than fifty feet in height. The second most common, though much less abundant, native tree is the tea-leaved willow (Salix phylicifolia), which in Iceland grows as a shrub.
Even these meager forests, though, were all but denuded by the Scandinavian settlers within a few centuries for charcoal, firewood, and to clear land for farming. Uninterrupted grazing by the Icelanders’ livestock over the centuries ensured that the vast majority of Icelandic forests never recovered. Land use was so intensive that eventually less than one percent of the entire island was considered to be forested.
Here in the Allegheny National Forest region, we also had intense, impactful land use by settlers, during the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s, in which nearly the entire native old-growth hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) and beech (Fagus grandifolia) forest was clearcut. However, differences here include our temperate climate, better soils, and a longer growing season, which allowed for rapid natural regeneration and eventual recovery of forests — wherever people refrained from cutting them back down again, that is. We also do not have anywhere near the prevalence of livestock grazing as has been ubiquitous across Iceland.
In 2017 Throstur Eysteinsson, director of the Icelandic Forest Service (“Skograektin”), wrote that “among the first things that visitors to Iceland usually notice are that it is not as warm as where they came from, and there is a lack of forests in the landscape. They connect these two facts and come to the conclusion that Iceland is too cold for forests. However, over a century of forestry has proven that it is past land-use and not climate that explains the treeless landscape.”
Reforestation, or perhaps more accurately afforestation, of Iceland had its nascent beginnings at the end of the 19th Century at Thingvellir, northeast of the capital city of Reykjavik, where the world’s first parliament began meeting in 930 AD, with the planting of small groves of non-native conifers. Today Thingvellir is Iceland’s most well-known national park (established in 1930 to coincide with the 1,000th anniversary of the Althing), and a World Heritage Site. Some of these early groves today impress across Thingvellir’s landscape.
What is the difference between reforestation and afforestation? Reforestation is the process of planting trees in an existing forest where the number of trees has been decreased, such as through logging or a natural disaster. Afforestation is when new trees are planted or seeds are sown in a largely barren area where there are essentially no forests or trees, establishing an entirely new forest.
The Skograektin was formally established in 1908, and there were small-scale experiments in forest recovery around the country through the first half of the 20th Century. Much of this involved simply fencing tracts against livestock grazing in order to better allow natural recolonization of native birch forests. This strategy is probably akin to our modern practice here in Pennsylvania of erecting tall wire fencing, encompassing many acres for many years at a time, creating exclosures against white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) browse of seedlings.
Tree planting then began in earnest in Iceland around 1950, and since then tens of millions of seedlings of native and non-native trees have been planted. Non-native species utilized have included North American and European/Asian birch (Betula spp.), larch (Larix spp.), spruce (Picea spp.), pine (Pinus spp.), and poplar (Populus spp.).
I vacationed in Iceland last June, and among the many destinations I wanted to see, I made sure to visit Kirkjubaejarklaustur, in south-central Iceland, to visit a grove of trees planted in the mid-1940s which have now reached impressive heights. The tallest recognized individual tree anywhere in Iceland today is here, a Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) which Skograektin formally announced on September 12th, 2022 is now 30.15 meters (99 feet) tall, and it is also 19 inches in diameter at breast height.
I measured several additional Sitka spruce in this grove at more than 20 inches in diameter. Birds, which I took to be redwings (Turdus iliacus), flitted about to and fro in the understory of this grove as I walked the trails, demonstrating its value as wildlife habitat. Sitka spruce are native to western North America, but it is a species that seems to do relatively well in Iceland’s harsher environment.
Many people who vacation in Iceland tend to spend the majority of their time around the greater Reykjavik region, and elsewhere in the western part of the country. By contrast, I actually spent a lot of my time in far east Iceland, around the small town of Egilsstadir (population 2,500) and the Hallormsstadur National Forest surrounding Lake Lagarfljot. After leaving Kirkjubaejarklaustur, I headed straight for Egilsstadir along Route 1 — Iceland’s renowned Ring Road.
This area supports a most impressive demonstration of the successes of Icelandic afforestation efforts. All around the 16-mile long lake there are large stands of varying ages of manually planted forests. Several hiking trails through the man-made forests have been established. I hiked one called Bjargselsbotnar, which is a three-mile loop that climbs nearly 1,000 feet in elevation into the mountains above the south side of Lagarfljot. It took me through many acres of maturing planted coniferous forest at lower elevations, through groves of shrubby downy birch at higher elevations, and out above the treeline, affording sweeping views up and down the lake from above the stands of new forest.
I was excited to hear a number of times during my hike the song of a bird I had never heard before. At times, one of these birds seemed to be following me, perhaps curious or concerned about what kind of creature I was and what I was doing there in its territory. (I did not see any other people during my hike — surprising for a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon in June.) From its song, I was later able to determine that this inquisitive fellow was likely a common snipe (Gallinago gallinago).
Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) from northern Norway were introduced into eastern Iceland during the late 1700s, and there is an extensive interpretive reindeer display at the East Iceland Heritage Museum in downtown Egilsstadir. While the Icelandic reindeer population has fluctuated quite a bit over the years, nearly crashing at times, strict hunting policies were enacted in 1901, and today the population is stable.
A quota hunting system is now employed to manage reindeer populations in Iceland at sustainable levels. This is perhaps not entirely unlike the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s ongoing lottery system for managing the elk (Cervus canadensis) population in north central Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, I did not catch sight of any reindeer in the wild during my time exploring eastern Iceland.
It was announced earlier this year that more than two percent of Iceland is now officially considered to be forested — closing in on 500,000 acres altogether. (For comparison, our Allegheny National Forest today comes in at 514,185 acres.) Two percent might not sound like a lot, but it is a benchmark that Icelandic foresters have been looking forward to achieving. The Skograektin goal is to have 2.6 percent of Iceland forested by 2040, and more than five percent of the country forested before the end of the century. This will require a herculean effort involving the planting of many millions of tree seedlings beyond what they have already done.
While Iceland’s planted forests are impressive, they do not yet compare to the natural maturing forest of, say, the 8,663-acre Hickory Creek Wilderness Area or the 9,705-acre proposed Tracy Ridge Wilderness Area here in the Allegheny — both areas that were once completely denuded, but are now cloaked by a healthy, diverse maturing forest due directly to a long-term hands-off management strategy.
Icelandic forests will likely never achieve the grandeur that the Tionesta Scenic and Research Natural Areas old-growth, or the Cook Forest State Park old-growth, offers here in our region. Certainly not in the lifetime of anyone alive today. But the Icelanders’ determined efforts toward reforestation of a heretofore largely barren land is most commendable, and awe-inspiring.
On my last day in Egilsstadir, I stopped by the Skograektin office in town hoping to purchase a large map of Lagarfljot and the surrounding Hallormsstadur National Forest. A map aficionado, I wanted one to hang on my wall at home. They did not have any such maps for sale, but I did have the opportunity to speak to two Skograektin personnel about their tree-planting efforts.
One of them, Borja Alcober, was interested to learn that I am from Pennsylvania, because he had spent a year in high school as a foreign exchange student in Williamsport. He vividly remembers Penns Woods’ lush green forests, and that inspires him to envision a similarly sanguine future for considerably more of Iceland someday.
It does not seem likely that much of these new forests will be preserved in a hands-off wilderness type of protected status anytime soon, except for the most historic sites, where they occur within national parks, where they occur in small protected groves such as at Kirkjubaejarklaustur, and the like.
Most of the rest of the planted forest acreage will likely be actively thinned, managed, and harvested as time goes on. That is just the nature of an ‘artificial’ even-aged forest with seedlings that were generally planted on a tightly-packed spacing.
Currently little sawn lumber is being produced from Icelandic forests, though that may change with time as their trees continue to get larger. The primary wood products produced to date from these new forests have been wood chips (a by-product of thinning operations), firewood, and roundwood such as for fenceposts.
There is a great opportunity in Iceland in the decades and centuries ahead to plant vast acreages of forest, which will improve wildlife habitat and water quality. These new, rapidly growing forests will also act as an important carbon sink, drawing massive volumes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and holding it in its wood and in the duff layer on the forest floor. In 2016 Skograektin estimated that 210,000 tons of carbon dioxide is sequestered per year just in the Icelandic forests planted after 1990.
What fun it would be to be able to visit Iceland again in 100 or even 200 years to see what the today’s new forests have matured into. If only it were possible. As the old adage goes, “a society grows great when men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
