Assessing the impact of private forest owner preferences on the supply of ecosystem services

Abstract:
Decisions made by forest owners impact the forest’s ability to provide multiple ecosystem services. In Fennoscandia, production forests are primarily managed by hundreds of thousands of private owners with diverse preferences towards provision of wood, non-wood timber products, aesthetic value, carbon cycling and biodiversity conservation. Despite the key role of owners in shaping forest landscapes, studies exploring sustainable forest planning often ignore owner preferences when assessing future scenarios. We aim to explore how forest ownership structure can affect forest multifunctionality at landscape level. Using a multiobjective forest planning tool, we explored (1) how owner preferences affect a forest’s capacity to supply multiple ecosystem services, and how integrating preference information into the optimization affects (2) forest management and (3) the synergies and trade-offs between owner priorities. We compared a landscape-level management scenario maximizing sustained yield with holding-level scenarios meeting forest owner preferences. We classified owner preferences for different objectives into six broad categories based on published surveys. Specific owner-level preferences were assigned to holdings through a Monte-Carlo approach. Maximizing sustained yield contributed to wood provisioning and a selection of non-wood ecosystem services. In this case management was oriented to rotation forestry, which created strong trade-offs between multiple ecosystem services. Including forest owner preferences in the optimization problem resulted in economic loss but improved biodiversity and carbon cycling. Forest management was less intensive, oriented towards set-aside and continuous cover forestry. The synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem services depended on the owner priorities. Accounting for owner preferences supports integration of sectorial forest policies.