Israel's planted pine forests on open land

Afforestation in Israel began about a century ago under KKL-JNF, with dense plantations dominated by Aleppo pine.³ Forested land grew from 30,000 hectares in 1960 to about 100,000 hectares in 2015, half of it conifers and eucalyptus, and Aleppo pine plantations now stretch from the Northern Negev to the Upper Galilee and the Golan Heights.² Much of the country is naturally open: shrubland, grassland, loess plains and sand, with few trees or none.² A 2019 report by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) gathered the field studies.^1,2 In the Northern Negev the Be'er Sheva fringe-fingered lizard, found only on the loess plains, made up half of all reptile sightings on natural ground and was absent from planted ground.² In the Jerusalem Mountains a dense mature forest held less than half the plant species of the unplanted land beside it.² Of the 21 shrubland specialist bird species that breed in Israel, 57% are endangered.² Pines also seed out into neighbouring shrubland: models in the report project their share rising from 1% to 11% within 60 years in dry areas such as Lakhish, and to 70% or more where pines do well.² On top of the forest plans, KKL-JNF's southern district planted or prepared for planting hundreds of hectares a year (520 in 2010, 396 in 2011) to assert ownership of state land, which the forest statistics do not count.²

Who needs an answer

• Planners deciding, under the national outline plans, which areas are "natural forest" to be left alone and which are designated for planting.²
• KKL-JNF, which plants and manages the forests, and the Israel Land Authority, which plants to assert ownership of state land.²
• The Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which the report proposes should manage the open areas.²
• Fire services and towns next to planted pine.

The domains it chains

Rainfall and runoff on dry ground; which plants and animals open land supports and which a forest supports; pines spreading from plantings into shrubland; fire risk in planted conifer stands; carbon taken up by trees against the heat absorbed by a darker surface; recreation, land claims and planning law. For the Yatir Forest, the report cites an estimate of about 80 years before the cooling from stored carbon outweighs the warming.²

What a twin should let people try

• Planting maps: which proposed planting sites overlap the rarest open habitats, and what is lost if each goes ahead?
• Spread: where will pines from existing plantings move over the next decades, and where is removing seedlings worth it?
• Fire and climate: under drier summers, how do fire risk and the carbon balance differ between planted pine and native shrubland?

Where to start

The SPNI report sets out criteria for assessing planting programmes and lists its underlying studies, among them work on the Northern Negev loess plains and the Yatir Forest.² iNaturalist holds species sightings across the country, and the wildfire use case covers fire models.