A window into forest landscapes : Studying the relationship between forests, ownership, ecosystem services, and biodiversity in landscapes

Abstract: Production forests are faced with the challenge of adapting to environmental change and simultaneously helping mitigate it and host rich biodiversity. This leads to new conflicts and trade-offs for forest management. Many management options have been proposed to achieve these goals while minimizing the loss of timber production. In this thesis, I explore the status and future of forest landscapes through multiple disciplines including physical geography, ecology, and forestry. Across landscapes, solutions for increased sustainability can be limited by the distribution and size of non-industrial privately-owned forest (NIPF) properties. At the national scale, it is important to prioritize the parts of the country where environmental measures should be focused. In my thesis, I studied different aspects of the relation between Swedish forests and spatial and temporal scale within the context of forest sustainability. I studied how NIPF properties could be classified by the characteristics of the forest within them. I also investigated how this characterization related to characteristics of the owner such as gender and age. Many forest properties were still significantly shaped by storm damage from over 15 years earlier. The diversity of forests that NIPF owners have presents each owner with a different challenge to adapt to a changing environment. This landscape diversity can affect the possibility of NIPF owners to implement environmental considerations in management. To illustrate this, I showed that forest owners with large properties can store more carbon in their forest at a lower cost than owners with little forest. Additionally, introducing carbon sequestration targets in forestry to aid mid-century climate mitigation efforts could be particularly costly for forest owners. Furthermore, the distribution of streams in a forest landscape will affect the amount of forest land that owners have to set-aside to protect those streams. I showed that the cost of implementing those buffer zones is unequally distributed among forest owners and that this inequality is largest among owners with small forests. The benefits of economies of scale can be explained by the positive relationship between spatial scale and landscape heterogeneity. Future policies should take this relationship into account to effectively persuade forest owners to increase the sustainability of their forests. Finally, I evaluated whether a proposed prioritization of Swedish landscapes for future conservation measures can target specialist and threatened forest birds. The proposed scheme mainly covered specialist forest birds in Northern Sweden and appropriate conservation measures could benefit those species. In other parts of Sweden, additional prioritizations are needed to provide sufficient opportunities to protect forest biodiversity. Overall, this thesis shows how the heterogeneity within and between forest landscapes influences the potential to increase sustainability for different environmental targets in forest management in Sweden. The understanding of the spatial distribution of forest properties, the spatiotemporal scale of management, and interactions between forestry objectives are all essential for solving the environmental puzzle that 21st-century forestry faces.