Forest covers more than half the park, rising to about 210 metres at its highest points and holding 31 mammal species, including moose, alongside 28 kinds of fish in the Pilica itself. Rare plants persist at the edge of their range in its boggier corners, among them the carnivorous sundew and the ten-leaved helleborine. Five nature reserves protect the richest fragments: Konewka's old oak woodland, Żądłowice's ash-alder floodplain forest on a wide bend of the Pilica terrace, and Spała's riverside forest, with Jeleń and Sługocice protected in the buffer zone. The hunting tradition that shaped this forest continued into the 19th century, when Tsar Alexander III, taken with the Pilica woods in 1880, ordered a hunting residence built at Spała. A European bison breeding centre operated in the park's buffer zone at Smardzewice from 1934 until it closed in 2014.