Abstract
An understanding of private forest owners is needed for appropriate forest governance and outreach to forest owners. This study examined different types of objective and subjective knowledge (i.e., actual knowledge and confidence, respectively), including general forest knowledge and knowledge of management for different objectives, among individual private forest owners in Sweden. In addition, the importance of structural variables (e.g., gender, size of forest holding) and forest involvement variables (e.g., certification, involvement in forest planning) for forest knowledge was analysed. The study was conducted by means of a postal questionnaire to a random sample of private forest owners in Sweden (n = 3000, response rate 43%). Structural variables, but particularly involvement variables, were found to be related to subjective and objective knowledge. Being a male owner, owning a larger forest holding, having bought the land, and having owned the forest a long time were associated with higher subjective knowledge, or confidence, in managing the forest. Although being a male owner, for example, was also associated with higher levels of objective knowledge, the correlation diminished when controlling for forest involvement. The study considers the role of learning environments for forest owners and highlights the need to elaborate on the conceptualization and measurement of forest knowledge to understand the links between structural characteristics, forest involvement, and forest knowledge among private forest owners.
Highlights
The management of forests has implications on ecosystem services; that is, regulating, supporting, provisioning, and cultural services provided by the forest
Whereas previous studies have revealed links between different types of forest involvement and subjective knowledge (Sun et al 2009; Creamer et al 2012), this study showed that certification and membership in forest owner associations were associated with higher objective forest knowledge
Whereas it is not appropriate to compare the measures of objective knowledge, the present study suggests that the owners have more confidence when it comes to production management and general forest matters, but lower confidence when it comes to mitigation and adaptation management
Summary
The management of forests has implications on ecosystem services; that is, regulating, supporting, provisioning, and cultural services provided by the forest. Optimizing, for example, the provisioning of timber, may be detrimental to aspects such as biodiversity maintenance (Trivino et al 2017). The forest may be used for carbon sequestration via either forest management for Communicated by Martin Moog. Private forest owners were often farmers, living close to their forest and depending on the forest as their main source of income.
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