Forest owners' future intentions for forest management

Abstract

Forest owners' intentions to apply alternative management practices were examined to increase the understanding of the factors that influence forest management on non-industrial private forests. Randomly selected Finnish forest owners were surveyed to determine their management intentions for five management practices: traditional management; short rotation management; long rotation management; uneven-aged management; and other management. A fractional multinomial logit model was used to analyse the influence of variables from three factor groups on management intentions: (i) property characteristics and the past experience of forest owners; (ii) beliefs in how well forests are generally managed; and (iii) the socioeconomic characteristics of forest owners. Forest owners intended to use multiple management practices in their forests. The most typical practice was traditional management (51.5% of respondents' total forest area), followed by uneven-aged (25.0%) and long rotation management (15.3%). Our results show that forest owners still maintain the use of traditional even-aged forestry as the most commonly applied forestry practice in Finland, but they intent to use increasingly uneven-aged forestry in future. Several variables influenced on management intentions. For example, men, agricultural entrepreneur and older respondents tended to allocate a smaller proportion of their forest area to uneven-aged forestry. Ongoing socio-economic changes may enforce the change in forest management practices.