Interactive Method for Supporting Forest Owners in Biodiversity Protection Decisions

Abstract

Voluntary biodiversity protection tools have been adopted for practical use in many countries where non-industrial private forest ownership includes invaluable biodiversity resources. This has created a new kind of decision problem for individual forest owners: they should be able to define their conditions for entering into a biodiversity protection contract including sometimes a predetermined subsidy. This study presents a holding-level method for examining this decision problem. The method is based on utilization of interactive optimization where the possible subsidy has been included in the protection (no treatment) alternative of the examined stand. Generally, interactive optimization means that the landowner pinpoints the best plan by interactively studying and learning the production possibilities of his/her forest holding. Following changes made to the objective function by the forest owner, new solutions are presented for forest owners’ evaluation. If the “No treatments” option is selected in optimization for these areas, the forest owner would benefit more—in the current location of the production frontier and with the current subsidy—from entering into the protection contract than from cutting the specific forest area. In the case study, we demonstrate that the values of the holding-level goals, production possibilities of the planning area and the levels of the subsidy have a significant effect on the optimal decisions relating to biodiversity protection on the stand level.