Abstract
Considering the variety of attitudes, objectives and behaviors characterizing forest owners is crucial for accurately assessing the impact of policy and market drivers on forest resources. A serious shortcoming of existing pan-European Decision Support Systems (DSS) is that they do not account for such heterogeneity, consequently disregarding the effects that this might have on timber supply and forest development. Linking a behavioral harvesting decision model—Expected Value Asymmetries (EVA)—to a forest resource dynamics model—European Forestry Dynamics Model (EFDM)—we provide an example of how forest owner specific characterization can be integrated in a DSS. The simulation results indicate that the approach holds promise as regards accounting for forest owner behavior in simulations of forest resources development. Hence, forest owner heterogeneity makes the distribution of forestland on owner types non-trivial, as it affects harvesting intensity and, subsequently, inter-temporal forest development.
Highlights
Forest owners differ considerably as to objectives, attitudes and behaviors
In the section that follows, we present the tool for harvesting behavior, Expected Value Asymmetries (EVA), derived from the theoretical framework presented in Rinaldi and Jonsson [8] and the preliminary simulation model introduced in Rinaldi and Jonsson [9]
The current study suggests a framework to overcome the shortcoming of current forestry decision support systems (DSS) of not fully accounting for forest owner heterogeneity
Summary
Forest owners differ considerably as to objectives, attitudes and behaviors. Considering such heterogeneity is crucial for ensuring that policy instruments are effective [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Policy impact analysis necessarily requires the use of integrated frameworks in which forest owners are modeled as realistically as possible, taking into account the most relevant factors that influence their individual harvesting decisions, and, total wood supply and forest development. Existing Decision Support Systems (DSS) operational at pan-European level do not explicitly consider the distribution of forestland on different forest-owner types. An illustrative example is the EUwood study [7], where forest owner harvesting behavior was exclusively linked to forest holding size. Small forest holdings were assumed to result in a smaller percentage of the potential wood supply being available
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
