Guardians of the forest

Vote for your team! When donating, just put the #beech or #woodpecker in your public comment.

The logging of large areas of forest is standard in Age of Empires. Just because our AoE legends hack trees with hundreds of villagers doesn't mean we don't care about the forest. It’s quite the opposite, as forest dieback has become a real problem. 

By nature, more than 90 percent of Germany would be covered by forest, most of it beech or mixed beech/oak forests. Ancient beech forests are the rainforests of Europe, and similar to the tropics, they are in very poor condition. Today, ancient forests barely exist in Germany, and the old trees are becoming increasingly rare. Beeches with an age of at least 180 years only have a share of 0.16 percent of the land area. 

Many highly specialized animal and plant species have adapted to such permanent forests. Most of them depend on particularly old trees; the rare middle spotted woodpecker, for example, can only colonize beech forests when the trees are 200 years old or more. 

We want to tackle this problem together. For every 4.75 euros donated, we will protect one square meter of ancient forest in Germany for 50 years. In the end, the winning team gets the naming right for our protected forest area. Let’s face this problem together. Let’s be guardians of the forest!