Large-scale forest corridors to connect the taiga fauna to Fennoscandia

Finland and Russian Karelia belong to the same biogeographical entity, lyin g on the same Precambrian bedrock. During the last half century there has b een an enormous 'natural experiment', in which forestry in Finland has been very intensive, whereas in Karelia forestry has been negligent leaving lar ge primaeval areas untouched. As a result, Russian forests have a much grea ter diversity of wildlife. In particular, rare species and species favourin g old forests are more abundant in Karelia than in Finland. Typical dominan t species in Finland are those characteristic of younger successional stage s as well as many vole-dependent small carnivores. Finland is situated on t he eastern margin of a vast coniferous taiga. The future of the taiga fauna in Fennoscandia is dependent on the condition of the taiga forests in Russ ia and on the connectivity of Fennoscandian forest areas to the intact taig a, i.e. connectivity at the border between Russia and Finland. In this pape r, we focus our attention on the narrow isthmus between the White Sea and L ake Onega, which is an extremely important connection for the northern elem ent of the taiga fauna. The capercaillie Tetrao urogallus may be a good foc al species, with its large spatial requirements for lek areas depicting the need for connectivity to maintain viable populations. We suggest that larg e-scale connections should be planned, 'forest bridges' intruding into Finl and and even into Sweden, where the proportion of mature forests would be h igh enough las much as 1/3 of the total area) to guarantee the connectivity between subpopulations. We argue that this may not necessarily represent a dditional costs for forestry, provided that actions are taken for a careful large-scale planning of forest harvesting to satisfy the requirements of t hese corridors. We believe that large-scale preservation of ecosystems will be a better strategy in the future than species-specific conservation prog rammes for wildlife species.