The oaks are the most important of trees. Oak forests have never reattained the majesty they had during the days of Venice's power when they could be called upon to furnish 400 shiploads of straight oak stems for Venetian fleets, but in 1970 they still constituted nearly half of all forests. The oaks are valuable not only for their economic worth as fuel and lumber but also because the leaves of deciduous varieties and the undergrowth encouraged beneath them are excellent soil builders. Occurring at moderate elevations, however, they have been accessible and overexploited. Lowland oak forests contain poorer species that rarely grow in excess of thirty feet tall, but the thick undergrowth they usually allow provides stability and improves the alluvial soil. The finer and more valuable species occur at middle and higher elevations. Oak forests predominate between 1,000- and 3,000-foot elevations but occur up to about 4,000 feet.
Beech trees appear at all elevations between 3,000 feet and the timberline. They predominate in northern areas between about 3,500 and 6,000 feet. In the south they flourish at the same elevations but are usually outnumbered by conifers. Beech is excellent hard wood, and its leaves are among the best of soil builders. The trees generate most of the humus themselves, as their canopies interlace tightly in mature forests, permitting relatively little undergrowth to flourish on the forest floors beneath them. Mature forests have survived in many of the remote, inaccessible areas that beech species prefer. The most copious forests are in cloud forest regions where cloud cover is almost constant, rainfall is frequent, and temperatures do not usually reach the extreme highs.
The better conifers, usually including several pine species in the north and fir, with lesser numbers of pine and spruce, in the south, coexist with beech but tolerate poorer soils and tend to predominate at the highest elevations. Although they tend to have less continuous canopies than beech forests, they do not encourage undergrowth. Their needles, along with rapid decay of their softer dead wood, however, can create deep humus. The poorer quality lowland pines do well at elevations down to sea level and will tolerate certain conditions, although not overly poor drainage, in which the oak will not survive. Its woods usually have discontinuous canopies and allow dense maquis and other lower shrubs to flourish beneath them.
True mixed woods, sometimes referred to as karst woods, occur at medium elevations. They are usually almost entirely deciduous but have wide varieties of species. The larger trees include maple, ash, beech, and oak, but these are vastly outnumbered. Intermediate varieties of hawthorne, dogwood, hazel, and cherry flourish among the larger trees, and hundreds of smaller plants, ranging from bushes, shrubs, and ferns to grasses and moss, provide ground cover. With a profusion of varieties in constant competition for available space and soil, those that do best in a particular soil mixture prosper in a given locality. Because the soil in the uplands relates closely to the base rock and the mountains were created by geologically recent folding that has exposed the edges of layered rock formations, there are abrupt changes in the basic surface rock. This is reflected immediately in mixed woods by equally abrupt changes in the species that appear.
Of the more abundant smaller flora families, the daisy, pea, grass, pink, nettle, mustard, parsley, figwort, rose, buttercup, and lily groups has more than fifty species that can be found within Albania. Flowering plants flourish especially well in limestone areas where there are masses of vividly colored wild flowers during the springtime. Must less brilliant colors appear on serpentine outcroppings and, as is the case with the mixed woods, the difference is abrupt where limestone and serpentine are the surface rocks in closely adjacent areas.
Wildlife
Summer livestock grazing in the mountains and uncontrolled hunting reduced wildlife to insignificance. Some deer, wild boar, and wolves remain in the more remote forests. Chamois were plentiful in the area but are now extremely rare. Wild fowl, however, are abundant in the lowland swamps and lower forests.
Exploitation of the country's minerals generates the largest share of the gross industrial product and provides employment for the largest number of the industrial labor force. This does not indicate, however, that the country is rich in mineral resources, but it serves to underscore the still poorer state of its agricultural and industrial sectors and indicates that the country engages in relatively little international commerce.
There are considerable reserves in oil and natural gas. Oil can be extracted in quantity sufficient to meet domestic demands and to export. A pipeline from the oilfields at Stalin (formerly Kucove) transmits the oil to the port of Vlore. The crude oil, however, has a high sulfur content and is expensive to refine.