Digital pan-European forest cover maps of potential and current forest cover were compiled together with a digital map of Europe's protected areas. Digital overlays of these data were undertaken and statistics produced indicating the current state of protection of differing forest types, in respect to the location of these forests within legally gazetted areas.

The study indicates that 56% of Europe's forest has already been lost. Europe's potential forest cover was 7,395,440 km² and current forest cover is 3,255,680 km². Of this, 204,996 km² lie within protected areas (IUCN management categories I-IV).

The analyses were undertaken by country and by forest type at complex (66 forest types) and simplified (20 forest types) level. At a national level, forest protection ranges from 11.7% in Belarus to less than 1% in relatively large countries such as Bosnia Herzegovina, United Kingdom and Belgium.

The analysis of current forest cover using a simplified forest classification system (20 categories), found that forest protection varies from < 0.5% for spruce woodland amid hygrophilous birch tundra, to 18.5% for conifer forests in mires and bogs.

An indication of the wilderness quality of these forests is given by the analyses of protected forest by forest size. This shows that rather few (329) relatively large (> 10,000 ha) sites account for 67% of Europe's protected forests. Conversely, 95% of Europe's protected forest areas comprise fragments of less than 1,000 ha. Together these fragments protect less than 10% of Europe's forests. Forty-five of the 50 largest protected forest areas occur in the Russian Federation and Fennoscandia, accounting to a large extent for the much greater proportion of Europe's protected forest that is found in northern Europe, compared to that found in the south.

For each regional map there are eight different views of forest type, cover, protected areas or combinations of these data, that can be chosen from the pull-down menu.