Towards a benchmark of national training requirements for continuous cover forestry (CCF) in Sweden

Abstract

Continuous cover forestry (CCF) is forest management based on ecological and biological principles. CCF particularly requires the abandonment of clearfelling practices in favour of more natural approaches of regeneration. Recently, CCF has been identified as a way to mitigate climate change, to bring about forest conservation and to meet the diverse requirements of recreation forests. EU strategies support the use of CCF and Sweden is committed to the transformation of 20% of its plantation forest land to CCF. This policy change meets the Swedish forest industry rather unprepared. CCF training is therefore urgently required and we applied marteloscope techniques to begin with establishing a benchmark of training requirements. A marteloscope is a forest research plot where all trees are measured and have clearly visible numbers on the stem surface. We carried out a first marteloscope experiment at the Svartberget experimental forest near Umeå in Northern Sweden involving 13 test persons that we asked to carry out CCF management by selecting trees that are supposed to stay behind and others that are to be taken out in order to achieve CCF objectives. We applied specialised statistics to analyse the trainees’ choices and thus to measure their current state of silvicultural knowledge and experience. The results were interpreted in the context of data previously obtained from 26 comparable marteloscope experiments in Britain. The Svartberget results were in parts similar to and sometimes even closer to theoretical expectations than the British results, but also revealed that more intensive training was required in individual-based forest management, which is an important part of CCF. A new didactic technique, the competitor-for-frame tree rule, tightening the link between evicted and residual trees has contributed to the good tree-selection performance at Svartberget.