page_title: Shebenik-Jabllanicë National Park
section_title: Ecosystems
hierarchical_section_title: Shebenik-Jabllanicë National Park / Biodiversity / Ecosystems
caption_attribution_description: English: Valley near Llange. On the periphery of the Shebenik-Jabllanice Park, looking towards the village of Llange, Albania.
context_page_description: The Shebenik-Jabllanicë National Park is a national park in eastern Albania adjacent to the border with North Macedonia. It encompasses 339.277 square kilometres and is specifically marked by a mountainous landscape supplied with glacial lakes, valleys, dense coniferous and deciduous forests and alpine meadows and pastures. Elevations in the park vary from 300 metres to over 2,200 metres above the Adriatic at the peak of Shebenik and Jabllanica, hence the name. It dwells a number of endangered species that are fast becoming rare in Southern Europe, including the brown bear, gray wolf and balkan lynx. The abundance in wildlife can in part be explained by the variety of vegetation types and remote location.
  The park offers some of the most rugged scenery in the eastern section of country that were carved into their present shapes by the glaciers of the last ice age. It is home to 14 glacial lakes, the highest situated between 1,500 and 1,900 metres elevation above the Adriatic. Small cirque glaciers are fairly common in the mountain ranges, situated in depressions on the side of many mountains.
context_section_description: The national park features contrasting and diverse ecosystems, determined mainly by topography, climate, hydrology and geology. Those factors vary as altitude increases and so create a variety of environments, where different plants grow together in communities, which in turn provide favorable habitats for a wide range of wildlife.
  The montane ecosystem of the park offers a great diversity of landforms, together with an admirable plant and animal life, featuring meandering rivers, glacial lakes and vast meadows are surrounded by high mountains. The park has 14 glaciers and is dominated by mountainous terrain, which were carved into their present shapes by the glaciers of the last ice age, that were later filled by melt water and rain. They vary considerably in their size, shape and most notably in depth. They possess habitat for a restricted range of floral and faunal life, including shrubs, herbs, grasses, perennial and flowering plants.
  The forest ecosystem make up large areas of the national park and extends to higher elevations and particularly along valleys, streams and rivers. These areas provide important habitat for susceptible species of birds and other animals. The national park possess coniferous, mixed, and deciduous forests, some of which quite ancient because of their inaccessibility. The forests of deciduous, principally of European beech, are in particular present in the entire territory of the national park. In these forests, conifer trees such as the European silver fir, Bosnian pine, and Macedonian pine are also to be found but beech is generally more abundant.
caption: The beech forests of Rrajcë are part of the UNESCO Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Albania.[11][8]
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