Drents-Friese Wold

Drents-Friese Wold National Park was established in 2000 between the provinces of Drenthe and Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands, and protects some 61 km². It is one of the largest continuous woodland areas in the country.

Most of its area is pine plantations put in between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to fix the sands and produce pit props, on very poor sandy soils that medieval deforestation and overgrazing had degraded into deserts of moving sand. Today management works in the opposite direction: pine stands are thinned to recover heathland and to keep the remaining sand areas open.

The Aekingerzand is the largest of those sand areas, an expanse of bare, moving sand that constitutes an extremely rare habitat in western Europe and holds specialised species of insects, lichens and birds. The park also includes the valley of the Vledder Aa stream, with wet meadows and riverine woodland restored after decades of agricultural drainage. The wildlife includes roe deer, nightjar, woodlark and smooth snake, and in recent years there have been occasional records of the wolf, which has returned to the Netherlands through this region.