Relations between structural characteristics, forest involvement, and forest knowledge among private forest owners in Sw
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Relations between structural characteristics, forest involvement, and forest knowledge among private forest owners in Sweden Louise Eriksson1 · Clas Fries2 Received: 23 September 2019 / Revised: 15 June 2020 / Accepted: 2 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Learning environments · Private forest owners · Objective forest knowledge · Subjective forest knowledge
Introduction 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). To combat climate change, the forest may be used for carbon sequestration via either forest management for Communicated by Martin Moog. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-020-01314-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Louise Eriksson [email protected] 1
Department of Geography, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Forest Unit, Swedish Forest Agency, Box 284, 901 06 Umeå, Sweden
2
biomass production (substitution) or increasing the standing volume of trees (storage). However, while substitution may threaten biodiversity, storage may impede production goals (Bellassen and Luyssaert 2014; Felton et al. 2016; Klapwijk et al. 2016; Peura et al. 2018). With growing demands to use th
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