Holistic assessment of large old trees: a framework and its application for Romania

Large old trees are keystone ecological structures and have exceptional sociocultural values. Still, holistic approaches to national assessments of large old trees are scarse in the scientific literature. Here we propose and apply a holistic framework to understand the distribution of large old trees, the formal regulations targeting the conservation of large old trees and the ways large old trees are present in the popular news in Romania. There were 4032 large old tree records in Romania most of the records being concentrated in the Central and North-Western part of Romania. The number of tree records decreases with the decreasing terrain accessibility. Almost 50% of the large old tree records are in areas not covered by nature conservation regulations and 2/3 of the terrestrial protected areas have no open access large old tree records, so far. We identified five formal regulations which could be relevant for large old tree conservation in Romania, however, only two of these explicitly targets large old trees. The lack of knowledge and interest, the lack of expertize, institutional capacity, vested interests (corruption) and inconsistencies within the regulations are the major barriers in the formal protection of large old trees. We also identified several opportunities for the local initiatives to protect large old trees, based on the current legislative frameworks. We identified 259 internet news targeting large old trees in Romania which reveals a wide range of values and concerns associated to large old trees at the level of the local communities. While discussing our results we highlight the benefits of a wider adoption of our approach for science, decision making and local initiatives to save large old trees.