Hekluskógar — Reforesting the Slopes of Hekla Against Volcanic Ash Erosion

Iceland has lost an estimated half of its original vegetation cover — around 3 million hectares — to erosion since human settlement roughly 1,100 years ago, a process repeatedly worsened by ashfall from volcanoes such as Hekla, one of the country's most active.

Launched in 2007, the Hekluskógar project set out to re-establish native birch (Betula pubescens) and willow woodland across an approximately 90,000-hectare target area on Hekla's slopes, using a low-cost 'woodland island' strategy: small clusters of birch and willow are established with soil fertilisation and grass seeding on the most unstable ground, then left to spread naturally as seed sources recolonise the surrounding land.

By 2014, more than 2.3 million seedlings had been planted across 1,200+ hectares of small patches, with 210 landowners enrolled and all planting mapped into a GIS database, feeding ongoing ecological monitoring documented in the peer-reviewed study 'From Bare to Birch: Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration in Iceland'. During the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, the young Hekluskógar woodland in the ash-fall zone reportedly 'survived and healed within a few weeks', an early indication that established woodland can buffer against tephra deposition better than bare, eroding ground.

The project remains a long-horizon effort: the 1,200+ hectares directly planted by 2014 represent a small fraction of the 90,000-hectare target, with most future gains expected to come gradually from natural woodland spread rather than further direct planting, progress that is difficult to independently verify without more recent monitoring data.