Forest owners' future intentions for forest management

Forest owners' intentions to apply alternative management practices were examined to increase the understanding of the factors that influence forest management on non-industrial private forests. Randomly selected Finnish forest owners were surveyed to determine their management intentions for five management practices: traditional management; short rotation management; long rotation management; uneven-aged management; and other management. A fractional multinomial logit model was used to analyse the influence of variables from three factor groups on management intentions: (i) property characteristics and the past experience of forest owners; (ii) beliefs in how well forests are generally managed; and (iii) the socioeconomic characteristics of forest owners. Forest owners intended to use multiple management practices in their forests. The most typical practice was traditional management (51.5% of respondents' total forest area), followed by uneven-aged (25.0%) and long rotation management (15.3%). Our results show that forest owners still maintain the use of traditional even-aged forestry as the most commonly applied forestry practice in Finland, but they intent to use increasingly uneven-aged forestry in future. Several variables influenced on management intentions. For example, men, agricultural entrepreneur and older respondents tended to allocate a smaller proportion of their forest area to uneven-aged forestry. Ongoing socio-economic changes may enforce the change in forest management practices.