A window into forest landscapes - Studying the relationship between forests, ownership, ecosystem services, and biodiversity in landscapes

Production forests are faced with the challenge of adapting to environmental change and simultaneously helping mitigate it and host rich biodiversity, leading to new conflicts in forest management. Many management options have been proposed to achieve these goals efficiently. In a landscape, solutions for increased sustainability can be limited by the distribution and size of non-industrial privately-owned forest (NIPF) properties. Nationally, it is important to prioritize which landscapes are most important for their natural values. In this thesis, I explore the status and future of forest landscapes through multiple disciplines including physical geography, ecology, and forestry. I studied how NIPF properties could be classified by the characteristics of the forest within them and how such a classification can be related to different factors that might explain it. Differences between forest properties and their size can affect the potential of owners to implement environmental considerations. I illustrate this using the cost of carbon storage and the protection of riparian forests as examples. Future policies should consider that the costs of sustainability are scale-dependent and unequally distributed to persuade NIPF owners to adapt management. Finally, I evaluated if a proposed prioritization of Swedish landscapes for conservation measures can target specialist and threatened forest birds. Overall, my thesis shows that the heterogeneity within and between forest landscapes influences the potential to increase sustainability for different environmental targets in forestry in Sweden. A good understanding of this is essential for solving the sustainability puzzle that 21st-century forestry faces.

This project is financed by the Strategic Research Area BECC.