Forest management to sustain multiple values to society: current and future implications

The ecosystem service (ES) concept has been promoted as a tool to understand and study the interactions between the human and the ecological system, providing a possibility to communicate both material and immaterial gains from natural capital, as well as the importance of long-term ecosystem stability to sustain a multitude of benefits to society.

This work intends to improve the knowledge of how forest management can influence the maintenance and supply of forest ecosystem services in the context of contemporary challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in Sweden. Increasing future demands for forest products, as well as changed frequencies and intensities of disturbances, pose challenges for the sustainable current and future use of Swedish forest ecosystems. The prioritizations and management actions of non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners are likely to have large implications for ecosystem functioning, as they hold 48% of all productive forest land.

In this project, values and attitudes among NIPF owners towards sustaining specific ES are mapped based on data from a questionnaire. Dominating management practices among NIPF owners are also determined, and their implications for managed forest ecosystems at the landscape scale.

The dynamic vegetation model LPJ-GUESS is updated with revised growth parameter values for the two commercially most valuable tree species in Sweden, Norway spruce (Picea abies) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), leading to an improved precision of the model in simulating managed forests during different stages of development. The updated model will be applied in future studies to determine how the forest ecosystems may change under plausible future trajectories of climate change. The simulations will consider the implications of varying prioritizations among of NIPF owners for ecosystem function over longer timescales. The results and future projections may prove useful to forest stakeholders and policy makers in planning and management.