The Heureka Research Programme - Mistra

Forest owner behaviour and dynamicsProject leader: Lennart Eriksson, Dept. of Forest Products, SLU, Uppsala.Participants: Fredrik Ingemarson, Dept. of Forest Products, SLU, Uppsala.Project aimThe aim of this project was to construct models for predicting private forestowners’ behaviour, in terms of plantation, pre-commercial and commercialthinning and final cuts. The ambition is to use these models for prognoses offorest activities among private forest owners in the Heurekasystem.The conveyance of real estate, and the importance of changes in decisionbehaviour, appeared to be difficult to describe, since transactions with legalratification (investigated in this study) do not include all transactions involvingreal estate.Methods used in the projectTobit-analyses (Amemiya 1984) were performed on the results of a survey offorest owners (1200 replies), in order to estimate prognostic models of forestowner behaviour. Data on 5590 transactions of estates with legal ratificationfrom 1990 to 2007, and two censuses of forest owners, were also subjected tostatistical analyses. The ambition was to discover structural trends in the ownershipof forest estates in terms of forest area of the estates, the owners’ livelihoodin relation to the estate, gender, age, etc. Interviews were performedwith estate agents as well as with owners involved in the conveyance of realestates during the last three years.User valuePrognoses of forest owner forestry behaviour are possible, given scenario valuesof the structure development of the forest owners.Scientific resultsModels for prognosis of forest activity decisionsThe owners of large forest estates are generally more active per hectare forestarea than the owners of small ones. At the same time the activity on forestestates in southern Sweden is greater than on those in the north, althoughthe northern forest estates are larger on average than those in the south.The state of the forest (estimated by kNN’s satellite-based data) expressed asstanding volume per hectare forest area and the area-weighted proportion offorest older than 20 years is positively correlated to the extent of both thinningsand final cuts. Young forest owners are generally more active in allforest operations than older forest owners. One variable, duration of possession,shows a varying relation to activity, since owners who have possessedtheir estates for 0-10 years are more active than others, but activity increaseswith time amongst owners who have had their estates for a very long time.Men are more active in all operations than women, but a nuanced interpretationof the data is that the latter group prefers commercial thinning and95