Involving stakeholders in forest management decisions

Forests are providing a wide range of ecosystem services, including timber production, sequestration and storage of carbon. The need to balance timber production goals against the maintenance of the other ecosystem services requires careful selection of forest management strategies. In addition, the management needs to ensure forest resilience, because extreme storms, prolonged droughts, pest outbreaks and wildfires may increasingly  affect forest productivity and stability across Europe, challenging the suitability of traditional management approaches.

However, forests are multifunctional socio-ecological systems and management decisions are not solely based on science. They need to consider preferences, values and politics of diverse actors such as public administrations, forest owners and managers, and environmental organizations. In the European research project ClimbForest, WP5, we have sought to achieve this by involving stakeholders in five categories: forest owners, forest industry, forest biodiversity, forest protection recreation and public forest officers. To capture the ranges in biogeography, forest types, management traditions, socio-ecological diversity and as well climate-related challenges such as drought, wildfire, storm and pests in Europe, we established such groups over a north–south and inland-coast gradients by having one group from each of the countries Spain, France, Czechia, Poland, and Norway.

We have activated the stakeholders by structured questionnaires and in situ field visits. The stakeholders have travelled together with the WP5 researchers visiting predefined forest sites in their five countries.  In each site, local foresters and other experts familiar with local conditions gave an overview of local forest conditions. In each site, we activated the stakeholders by asking them to come up with their recommended forest management. This was first done within each stakeholder category, followed by plenary discussions where the groups might want to adjust their recommendations and possibly end up with consensus solutions across groups. The recommendations should include the main options: tree species and forest management type, i.e. rotation or continuous cover (CCF). If they recommend rotation forestry, they needed to specify initial stand density (after pre-commercial thinning), number, type and strength of thinning, final stand density and type of final felling (clear cut, retention harvesting, seed tree harvesting or shelterwood logging). If they recommend CCF, they should specify frequency (years) and specification of logging strength. For this work we provided them with paper forms containing these options, i.e. the “forest management toolbox”. 

We supplement the recommendations on forest management from the stakeholder by running simulation of long-term forest development. This includes forest growth and the probability of certain forest damage. The models are process-based, empirical forest models, i.e. mainly the LPJ-Guess model followed by calculation of certain ecosystem service indicators. This provides understanding of the performance of the recommendations about a range of ecosystem services and as well the vulnerability towards major forest disturbance, and context-specific trade-offs between productivity, conservation, and risk reduction. When these simulations are completed, we will gather the stakeholders and give them the option to reassess and possibly change their recommendations.

Overall, our work combines participatory approaches with model-based simulations to identify future forest management.