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Forests for wood production and stress recovery: trade-offs in long-term forest management planning

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Abstract

Forests play an important role, contributing to human health and well-being as environments for recreation and rehabilitation. Stress has become a significant problem in modern societies, and the importance of forests as environments for stress relief has been recognized in recent years. To maintain and create forests for rehabilitation, consideration of their rehabilitation value needs to be incorporated into forest management planning and to do this, we need to define and quantify the characteristics of good rehabilitation forests. This study presents an approach for including rehabilitation value as an aspect of forest management planning. This approach is applied to three case study areas in northern, middle and southern Sweden to identify trade-offs between maintaining high wood production while creating forest areas suitable for rehabilitation from stress-related diseases. The results show that quite large areas of rehabilitation forest (10–15 % of total forest area) can be maintained at a relatively small loss in economic net present value (NPV) of wood production (ca 2 % of maximum NPV). When using the rehabilitation value indicator defined in this study, age and spatial variables (distance to roads and water) seem to be the most limiting factors.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Forest Society Foundation (Stiftelsen Skogssällskapet) under Grant 1011-78/150-7 and by the Faculty of Forest Sciences at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences as a part of the research program Forest and Health. We thank Karin Öhman, Hampus Holmström and Ljusk Ola Eriksson for Heureka support as well as creative discussions about treatment simulations and the optimization model. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Resource Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), 901 83, Umeå, Sweden

    Eva-Maria Nordström

  2. Department of Forest Ecology and Management, SLU, 901 83, Umeå, Sweden

    Ann Dolling & Ylva Lundell

  3. Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, SLU, P.O. Box 58, 230 53, Alnarp, Sweden

    Erik Skärbäck

  4. Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jonathan Stoltz

  5. Department of Work Science, Business Economics and Environmental Psychology, SLU, P.O. Box 88, 230 53, Alnarp, Sweden

    Patrik Grahn

Authors
  1. Eva-Maria Nordström
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  2. Ann Dolling
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  3. Erik Skärbäck
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  4. Jonathan Stoltz
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  5. Patrik Grahn
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  6. Ylva Lundell
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Correspondence to Eva-Maria Nordström.

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Communicated by Martin Moog.

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Nordström, EM., Dolling, A., Skärbäck, E. et al. Forests for wood production and stress recovery: trade-offs in long-term forest management planning. Eur J Forest Res 134, 755–767 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-015-0887-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-015-0887-x

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