Skuleskogen National Park 4.03

Skuleskogen National Park is a Swedish national park in Västernorrland County, on the coast of the Baltic Sea, in northern Sweden. It covers 30.62km, constituting the eastern part of the Forest of Skule.The park is characterized by a very rough topology with many rocky peaks, of which the highest is Slåttdalsberget, in altitude, rising directly from the sea. The topography is also marked by the presence of deep crevasses and caves. This particular topology can be found throughout the entire High Coast, a region of Sweden so named because it constitutes the highest section of the coast of the Baltic Sea. This region is in our day principally known as a favored site for the observation of the phenomenon of post-glacial rebound. Most of the region was under the sea less than 10,000 years ago, after the ice sheet that blanketed it melted. But thanks to the melting of this mass of ice that had been pressing down upon it, the ground is rising year by year, at a current speed of 8mm per year.Humans have left their mark upon the park, although they probably never established themselves there in great numbers. Numerous Bronze Age funerary cairns are still visible along the ancient coastline. Later, the forest was mainly used as pasture. Things changed in the middle of the 19th century when the logging industry spread throughout Sweden, affecting almost all the forest of the park. This exploitation ceased, however, at the end of that century, so that the current forest is dominated by trees more than 100 years old. This forest has thus been able to recover a part of its ancestral richness, and so contains an important fauna and flora, with several endangered species, such as the lichen Dolichousnea longissima, which is the park's symbol. This geological and biological richness led to the creation of a national park in 1984, followed by the inclusion of the park with the rest of the High Coast in 2000 in the UNESCO World Heritage List.