Forêts

The Champagne and Burgundy Forests National Park was created in 2019 across the departments of Haute-Marne and Côte-d'Or, in eastern France, and protects some 562 km². It is the eleventh French national park and the first devoted to lowland deciduous forest, a type of ecosystem that was not represented in the network despite covering much of the country.

It protects an extensive massif of beech and oak woods on calcareous soils, with old-growth stands, abundant deadwood and a community of saproxylic insects, fungi and forest birds of great value. Inside it lies the strict reserve of the Arc-Châteauvillain forest, one of the few in France where all intervention has been renounced entirely, letting the forest develop freely over centuries as a reference laboratory.

The territory also includes alkaline fens, dry grasslands and a network of streams with native crayfish, as well as a heritage tied to historic forestry and industry: charcoal kilns, forges and quarries scattered through the woods. Its creation was the result of a long process, not free of tension with part of the local population and the timber sector, and its management model seeks to reconcile the free development of the forest with silviculture in the adhesion zone.