From the series:
Everything except Zurich
The Swiss forest suffers, especially in the Jura. A visit to the Ajoie shows what could help him.
© Ralf Rottmann/Imago Images
Break tree tips protrude into the sky above the Ajoie. In the past, the beech forest near Pruntrut in the canton of Jura was what Förster calls a cathedral: 30 meter high trees with dense crowns that give the visitor the feeling of walking through a holy hall. But then came in 2018, the year of great drought. Today the beeches are hardly more than skeletons, the crowns broken off.
Valentin Queloz is a forest engineer and group leader Waldschutz Switzerland at the research institute for forest, snow and landscape (WSL) in Birmensdorf. At home he is in Delémont and in the forests of the Jura. “I’m a forest man,” he says. His full beard and the green hunter clothes say that too.
