Reconstructing European forest age maps at 100 m resolution from 1900 to 2019

Variation in forest age can contribute to differences in biomass accumulation, making it useful for understanding forest recovery and carbon dynamics. In Europe, centuries of forest use, diverse management regimes, and disturbance histories have produced a heterogeneous age structure. Yet a temporally consistent, high-resolution, and spatially explicit forest-age dataset has been lacking for the continent. Here we reconstruct a long-term (1900–2019), annually resolved forest-age record for 38 European countries. To map high-stand forest age, we implement a 100 m backcasting framework initialized from a 2020 reference map and constrained by natural disturbances, rotation-based harvesting, and historical forest-area change. In parallel, we reconstruct coppice age at 5 km resolution for 1900–2010 to represent short-rotation management and its gradual conversion to high-stand forests. Validation against National Forest Inventory data shows good agreement for young and middle-aged forests (R² = 0.77 and 0.92, respectively). At the continental scale, high-stand forests experienced pronounced rejuvenation around the mid-twentieth century and have aged gradually since then. In contrast, former coppice forests shifted from widespread young stands (5–25 yr) in 1900–1950 to a smaller extent and an increasingly older age structure in later decades as coppice was progressively converted to high stand. This dataset provides the first Europe-wide, spatiotemporally consistent, annually resolved record of forest-age dynamics, supporting assessments of management legacies, recovery trajectories, and long-term carbon-cycle impacts.