100s Of Hectares Of Greece's Iconic Fir Forests Dead Or Dying; Multi-Factor Stress, Including Warming, Is Moving Fast
In the southern Peloponnese, the Greek fir is a towering presence. The deep green, slow-growing conifers have long defined the region’s high-altitude forests, thriving in the mountains and rocky soils. For generations they have been one of the country’s hardier species, unusually capable of withstanding drought, insects and the wildfires that periodically sweep through Mediterranean ecosystems. These Greek forests have lived with fire for as long as anyone can remember.
So when Dimitrios Avtzis, a senior researcher at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) of Elgo-Dimitra, was dispatched to document the aftermath of a spring blaze in the region, nothing about the assignment seemed exceptional. He had walked into countless burnt landscapes, tracking the expected pockets of mortality, as well as the trees that survived their scorching.
This time, however, something felt wrong almost immediately. The scale was off. As Avtzis and his colleagues moved deeper into the trees, the familiar sights of a post-fire forest gave way to something far more unsettling. “There were hundreds upon hundreds of hectares worth of lost trees,” he says – not just those lost in the fire itself, but large patches dead and dying among the green, where the flames had not reached them. In the Peloponnese mountains, whole stretches of green forest are turning orange, as the long-lived fir trees dry up and die. The level of destruction was so far beyond what Avtzis had seen in previous years, it forced him to immediately contact the environment ministry and raise the alarm.
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The first is severe, prolonged drought, now a defining feature of Greece’s climate. The dryness is compounded by a steady decline in winter snow. A study by the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development and the National Observatory of Athens found that between 1991 and 2020, Greece lost an average of 1.5 days of snow cover a year, eroding one of the country’s most important sources of slow-release moisture. Then comes the biological fallout. Drought-degraded soils and shrinking groundwater leave fir trees weakened, creating an opening for insects. “We know that severe drought weakens the trees,” Avtzis says. “But when we looked more closely at what was happening, we found bark beetles had taken advantage. They were attacking the trees.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/19/survived-wildfires-drought-killing-greece-fir-forests-aoe