For months and years, state and non-governmental institutions have been talking incessantly about the poor state of various habitats in Latvia and their low quality, citing European documents and assessments. It is a known fact that the report was produced right here in Latvia, submitted to European institutions and... now it can be used with the authority and weight of Europe itself.
Forestry science representatives do not agree with this assessment, as they see a different picture from their day-to-day work with these issues. Well, as we hear on Latvijas Radio - responsible authorities can submit incorrect data, emotional data, or data that is not data at all to European institutions, and then refer back to it themselves!
What we - forest experts, owners, managers, researchers, hunters, and gatherers of forest produce - should call this, is up to us...!?!

From a telephone interview on the Latvijas Radio 1 programme "Labrīt" on 1 July 2019

Regarding the report to the European Commission

"...

Six years ago, when preparing the report, there was a very small volume of data because at that time, as we all know, there was also a crisis; practically no monitoring was taking place, it was happening on a very minimal scale, and other types of research were not taking place either. I must say: “Thank God we have had the opportunity to carry out such a large-scale study!” that we are currently conducting, and in parallel, there have been various studies carried out by universities, monitoring carried out by the aforementioned “Latvijas valsts meži”, as well as those we implemented ourselves.

These data have allowed us to draw more substantiated and specific conclusions that are no longer based on some sort of emotions or expert opinions. These are conclusions based more on data, but to say that the situation has changed in some very radical way, I would say, rather, no! However, perhaps we can now evaluate the situation more accurately. Previously, it is possible that for individual habitats or individual species, the assessment was lower than… Well - rated lower than it actually is. But, primarily, this was linked to the fact that there was no data and, i.e., it was due to a lack of data.

..."

(Gita Strode, Director of the Nature Conservation Department of the Nature Conservation Agency)