Official statistics: Romania's national forest stock advances 0.3 pct in 2018

At the end of 2018 Romania's national forest stock was of 6.583 million hectares - 27.6 percent of the country's surface, by 0.3 percent more compared to the end of 2017, mainly due to the reforestation of wooded pastures and the introduction in the forest stock of degraded land, shows data centralized by the National Institute of Statistics (INS). 

Last year, Romania had 6.418 million hectares under forest, with softwood forest covering 1.917 million hectares (29.9 percent), and hardwood forest - 4.501 million hectares (70.1 percent). 

A share of 64.3 percent of the total national forest stock was under public property - mainly under the management of the Romsilva National Forest Administration (75.3 percent), while private property accounted for 35.7 percent, being mostly under the management of private forestry structures (95.6 percent). 

"The surface of privately-owned forest land has an increasing tendency, to the detriment of forest land under public property, due to the continuation of the forest retrocession process," INS mentions. 

The national forest stock is unevenly distributed by development regions and counties, due to the various physical and geographical conditions and the economic and social development of the area. In 2018, the forest land was concentrated to a significant extent in the Center and North-East development regions (19.3 pct and 18.2 pct, respectively), followed by the West (16.1 pct), North-West (15.2 pct), South-West-Oltenia (12.4 pct), South-Muntenia (10.0 pct), South-East (8.4 pct) and Bucharest-Ilfov (0.4 pct) regions. 

The counties with larger forest areas were Suceava (438,000 hectares), Caras-Severin (428,000 hectares), Hunedoara (318,000 hectares), Arges (277,000 hectares), Valcea (272,000 hectares), Bacau (272,000 hectares), Harghita (264,000 hectares), Neamt (262,000 hectares) and Maramures (260,000 hectares).