Epsilon Open Archive

Abstract

The global biodiversity loss within forest ecosystems has attracted attention during the last decades. Awareness increased both world-wide and in Sweden, which led to changes in the Swedish forests policy. In the Swedish Forestry Act of 1993 the environmental and production goals became equally important, and several new policy implementation instruments were taken into use. One of these was the Woodland Key Habitat Survey, in which indicator species are used to identify sites with conservation values. The first two papers in this thesis assess the relationships between the lichen indicator species found in the study area (in South-Central Sweden) and their growing-substrates and habitats, respectively. Both studies confirm that the indicator species showed habitat preferences which included old or deciduous trees. In Paper II also the habitat preferences of sedentary birds were assessed and the mixed deciduous habitats showed to be the more species rich, compared to pure coniferous forest. Paper III and IV evaluate the forest owners’ intentions and knowledge of nature conservation, as well as their attitudes towards it. In paper III the conservation intentions of the forest owners were estimated on the harvest registration form and compared to the actual retention at the clear-cuts. The intentions were followed by associated practices, however, the retained amounts of stand structures were overall low. I conclude that the intentions did not increase over the study period, the retained amounts were too low to meet, e.g., the Forest Stewardship Council standards, and, also, that such forms could become important information instruments to the forestry authorities concerning intentions and practices of the forest owners. In Paper IV the results of a questionnaire sent to non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners within the study area, showed that knowledge about conservation and attendance to a recent educational programme, which included conservation information, were positively related to the attitude towards it. However, those occupied with land-use had a more negative attitude towards conservation than others. Also, in the ranking of operational goals for their own conservation efforts, only 7% of the respondents ranked ‘long-term species survival’ as their first priority, while the vast majority ranked ‘forest health’ as number one. In the fifth and last paper the usefulness of indicator species in monitoring systems adapted to NIPF owners, is discussed. In the questionnaire used in paper IV, NIPF owners were asked to mark all species that they could recognise, from a list of 12 forest species. The results showed that they had a weak knowledge of the listed lichens and fungi, but all four birds were recognised by more than 50%. Thus, in indicator species based monitoring systems for NIPF owners and the public only a few easily communicated and conspicuous species of documented indicator value should be used, e.g. vertebrates.