Assessment of the Conservation Value of Abandoned Land on Gogland Island, Baltic Sea

Gogland Island, located in the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea, was densely populated in the past but has been nearly abandoned since the Second World War. The self-restoration of wildlife takes place there. Recent research on the island aimed to evaluate the conservation value of this process. It was expected that the island would demonstrate a standard for the perfect state of protected areas of the boreal zone of Europe. The island has been overgrown with forests; open areas occupy insignificant parts and tend to shrink. Picturesque landscapes have been formed, but the conservation value of these areas are questionable as the biodiversity is rather low there. They contain “empty forest” that is partly impassable. The island demonstrates that to achieve the maximum effect for biodiversity conservation, the abandonment of land without any management would be insufficient. The fate of the island partly supports the concept of Pleistocene rewilding: a mosaic of forests and meadows, maintained by ungulates, should be considered a normal state of environments.