Kellerwald-Edersee

Kellerwald-Edersee National Park was created in 2004 in northern Hesse, on the slopes falling to the Eder reservoir, and protects some 57 km². It is one of the smallest national parks in Germany and the only one devoted entirely to beech forest.

Its value lies in the continuity and the age of the forest: it preserves one of the largest unfragmented hillside beech forests in central Europe, with stands more than two centuries old, trees twisted in shape by the poverty of the soil, and an accumulation of dead wood that supports a community of fungi, lichens, wood-boring insects and forest bats of great value. Management is non-intervention: the forest is left to develop freely.

In 2011 the park's beech forests were added to the World Heritage List within the serial property of the ancient and primeval beech forests of Europe, alongside other German components and the original Slovak and Ukrainian Carpathian ones. Beech is the tree that would naturally have covered most of Germany and of central Europe, and these stands document what that forest was like before human transformation. The fauna includes wildcat, edible dormouse and a woodpecker community tied to the old trees.