Family Forest Owner Management Decisions for Participants Enrolled in a Forest Property Taxation Program in Michigan

Benjamin Schram,Emily Huff,Jagdish Poudel,Karen Potter-Witter

doi:10.3390/f12010035

Abstract

Family forest owners affect the ecosystem services that forests provide and, thus, their management decisions are of interest to the forestry sector. There are many programs available to help family forest owners reduce the management costs, some of which involve a reduced tax burden in exchange for active management. Research Highlights: this study is the first to examine the family forest owners enrolled in a statewide forest property taxation program in Michigan in order to understand how parcel characteristics affect management decisions. Background and Objectives: the goal is to understand the relationships between parcel characteristics and family forest owner management decisions for these program enrollees. Materials and Methods: a dataset of enrollment information was compiled and cleaned, which resulted in 20,915 unique forest stands in the state. Key variables analyzed via multinomial regression include stand condition, size, density, forest types, and forest practices. Results: region, forest type, and stand size significantly predicted forest practices. Conclusions: given that stand and parcel characteristics significantly predict forest practice, it may be useful to use these data, rather than self-reported management data from the owners themselves in order to understand future management trajectories of private forests. These data also describe forest practices of enrollees in a tax program, demonstrating that the program is successfully incentivizing management and shedding light on how these programs can promote conservation and stewardship of private forests.

Highlights

Forest owners control the plurality (36%) of forestland in the United States [1].Because of this and their contributions to abundant, clean water, wildlife habitat, wood fiber, recreation, and other ecosystem services, it is important to understand the land they own, what it looks like, and how it is managed
The objective of this paper is to understand the relationships between parcel characteristics and family forest owner management decisions for participants that are enrolled in the Qualified Forest Program (QFP), one of Michigan’s two tax incentive programs for forest landowners
We focused on hypothesized predictors of forest practice, like parcel size and forest type/condition, as there was support from the literature that these were related to management decisions [15]

Summary

Introduction

Forest owners control the plurality (36%) of forestland in the United States [1].Because of this and their contributions to abundant, clean water, wildlife habitat, wood fiber, recreation, and other ecosystem services, it is important to understand the land they own, what it looks like, and how it is managed. Much of the literature aimed at evaluating conservation incentive programs focuses on counting tangible outputs that are easy to quantify and measures, such as the number of management plans developed, or tons of phosphorus retained, for example [2,3]. No such studies that we have found assess the relationship between parcel characteristics and management practices through a taxation program enrollee case study

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion