Atlas cedar

The Atlas cedar are tall trees with large trunks and massive, irregular heads of

spreading branches. Young trees are covered with smooth, dark-gray bark that

becomes brown, fissured, and scaly with age. The needlelike, three-sided, rigid

leaves are scattered along the long shoots and clustered in dense tufts at the ends

of short spurs. Each leaf bears two resin canals and remains on the tree three to

six years. The large, barrel-shaped, resinous female cones, greenish or purplish,

are borne on short stalks; they are covered by broad, thin, closely overlapping

woody scales, each with a clawlike projection.

The Atlas Cedar forests are distributed in Morocco (Rif, Middle Atlas, and

northeastern High Atlas) and Algeria (Aurès, Belezma, Hodna, Djbel Babor,

Djurdjura, Blida and Ouarsenis). The Middle Atlas (northern Morocco) contains

about 80% of the Atlas Cedar forest surface area (ca. 100,000 ha). The total area

of occupancy in Algeria and Morocco is estimated to be between 1,300 and

1,500 km2 (Terrab et al. 2008, Linares et al. 2011). The extent of occurrence is

more than 20,000  km2 and there are seven locations.

Atlas Cedar occurs at elevations of 1,300 to 2,600 m, where the amount of

annual rainfall ranges from 500 to 2,000 mm and the minimum temperature of

the coldest month ranges between −1 and −8 °C .