OREANDA-NEWS Large-scale fires that engulfed Siberia and the Far East, can lead to the complete destruction of commercial forest, including very valuable species of wood, such as cedar. The full amount of damage from the current fires can only be assessed in a few years.

“Of course, on the square that the fire passed, only a third of the trees die somewhere - most of them survive. For example, in Primorye, the most resistant to fire fire is oak, and often oak forests are experiencing multiple fires, but their wood is no longer suitable for logging. And so with all the species: after a fire, the tree becomes substandard,” said Konstantin Kobyakov, an expert of the forest program of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). 

According to him, if the fires in Russia continue in the same volumes, and on average about 10 million hectares are annually destroyed, the commercial forest will disappear in principle.

Kobyakov noted that accurate data on the damage caused to the forest by fire will be only after 15 years. This is due to the fact that some trees do not die immediately, but in Russia the growing area is recorded less than once in a decade.