J. For. Sci., 2026, 72(3):119-135 | DOI: 10.17221/87/2025-JFS

Balancing conservation and intervention: Managing forest diebacks in Slovakia's Tatra National ParkOriginal Paper

Paula Puškárová¹, Mikuláš Černota^2,3, Ján Slivinský⁴

¹ Faculty of Commerce, Bratislava University of Economics and Business, Bratislava, Slovakia

² Faculty of International Relations, Bratislava University of Economics and Business, Bratislava, Slovakia

³ Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland

⁴ State Forests of TANAP, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia

Disturbance regimes in Central European mountain forests are changing under the ongoing climate change, raising questions about how protected areas should respond to increasingly frequent windthrow and bark beetle outbreaks. In Tatra National Park, a major windstorm in 2004 triggered a landscape-scale bark beetle eruption that challenged long-standing expectations that non-intervention alone could safeguard forest ecosystems. Using the Socio-Ecological Systems framework, we combined long-term field observations with archival sources and stakeholder interviews to examine how ecological dynamics, governance structures, and actor perspectives interacted during and after the outbreak. We show that warming, abundant post-storm breeding substrate, and legacy Norwegian spruce (Picea abies) monocultures reduced forest resilience and enabled successive beetle waves. Governance fragmentation led to delayed decision-making, allowing large volumes of wind-felled timber to remain untreated and facilitating its spread into high-naturalness stands. In contrast, evidence from other European countries suggests that timely, spatially focused measures can reduce outbreak duration without compromising conservation values. Our results indicate that in disturbance-prone, spruce-dominated forest systems experiencing climate change, a combination of strict protection in core areas and timely, selective measures in adjacent zones is more likely to maintain resilience and support conservation outcomes than strictly passive or fully interventionist approaches.

Keywords: climate change; forest disturbance; protected areas; socio-ecological systems

Received: November 28, 2025; Revised: February 23, 2026; Accepted: February 24, 2026; Published: March 31, 2026  Show citation