WWF Hungary put the best 87 in a book and on a website

Most forests in Hungary are far from their potential natural state. Nearly half of the forested land is of artificial origin, and consists of non-native tree species which are managed with intensive short rotation silvicultural methods. However, due to historic land uses like coppicing or forest grazing, followed by regular forest management in the last 200 years, vast majority of the original forest cover – dominated by beech and various oak species – has become very different from their natural state – e.g. old trees and large diameter deadwood are missing in most (around 99%) of the stands. They are even aged, with only 1 to 3 native tree species; structural diversity of forests is reduced, and natural microhabitats are few, which impact species diversity of most taxa as well. WWF Hungary has completed a monography of the Hungarian forest sanctuaries in the LIFE4OakForests project. In addition to the book, an interactive website was created to grant everyone access to the database.

There are only a few exceptions where a forest patch is not profoundly affected by the abovementioned human activities, so their tree species composition and structure are comparable to that of natural stands. Veteran trees are not the only, but promising indicators for identification. In most cases inaccessibility or special use in the past (e.g. former hunting grounds for nobility, local wood supply for a city) can be found as reasons behind why these stands have survived many centuries without intensive felling, or had an opportunity to recover.
Old-growth forest patches are usually harbours of relatively high biodiversity and home to vulnerable or threatened, usually rare, specialist species. Birds like black stork or white-backed woodpecker almost exclusively occur in old forests with a high number of large trees and deadwood. Bats and other small mammals, amphibians like salamanders, xylophagous beetles – notably hermit beetle, longhorn beetle and also stag beetle –, mosses, fungi are also species groups highly dependent on old-growth forest structures as habitats.
Unfortunately, the legal framework of the country has never guaranteed the intactness of any forest stands in Hungary, and the same is the case today, with the exception of the core zones of forest reserves. However, most natural forests with old age classes are out of the forest reserve system or even unprotected. Appropriate conservation management of all these stands is of utmost importance, before their values disappear.
WWF Hungary under the E2 action of the LIFE4OakForests project has collected forests with high naturalness and a significant age class of trees. László Gálhidy, WWF Hungary’s Forest Programme Manager has visited each and every sanctuary forest listed in the book and collected relevant information such as their size, tree species and even information about how one can access these locations.
In order to make the collected data widely available for the public and to raise awareness on these forests, WWF Hungary put the sanctuaries on an interactive map.

On the https://szentelyerdo.wwf.hu/ website users can browse the forests, read about them and find hiking tips if they wish to visit them.

The pdf version of the Forest Sanctuaries in Hungary book is available here (in Hungarian)