19 August 2014: The European Environment Agency (EEA) has published a technical report on assessing High Nature Value (HNV) in forests. The report, titled ‘Developing a Forest Naturalness Indicator for Europe,’ is meant to support the ongoing identification of HNV forests in Europe and is expected to contribute to the production of an HNV regional map.

The report defines HNV forests and proposes five criteria for evaluating them: naturalness, the degree of human influence in an area, accessibility (specifically slope), growing stock and connectivity. Going forward, the report notes that observations on the ground do match these selected criteria, but that there remain a number of challenges associated with a complex multi-criteria approach that requires significant amounts of data.

The report provides, in addition to the proposed evaluation methodology, a map of HNV beech forests covering 19 countries in Europe. [FOREST EUROPE Press Release] [Publication: Developing a Forest Naturalness Indicator for Europe]