Abstract

Considering the variety of attitudes, objectives and behaviors characterizing forest owners is crucial for accurately assessing the impact of policy and market drivers on forest resources. A serious shortcoming of existing pan-European Decision Support Systems (DSS) is that they do not account for such heterogeneity, consequently disregarding the effects that this might have on timber supply and forest development. Linking a behavioral harvesting decision model-Expected Value Asymmetries (EVA)-to a forest resource dynamics model-European Forestry Dynamics Model (EFDM)-we provide an example of how forest owner specific characterization can be integrated in a DSS. The simulation results indicate that the approach holds promise as regards accounting for forest owner behavior in simulations of forest resources development. Hence, forest owner heterogeneity makes the distribution of forestland on owner types non-trivial, as it affects harvesting intensity and, subsequently, inter-temporal forest development.

Keywords

forest owner; forest development; timber supply; DSS

Published in

Forests
2015, Volume: 6, number: 2, pages: 311-327
Publisher: MDPI AG

SLU Authors

• Jonsson, Ragnar

  • Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Trubins, Renats

  • Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/f6020311

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/69298