Abstract
The global adoption of policies promoting sustainable forest management faces challenges, particularly in nations with predominantly privately-owned forests. To address this, there is growing support for fast-growing forest plantations. Typologies of private forest owners emerged worldwide as a tool to understand forest management practices and the engagement with promotion policies considering socio-economic variables, behavior, and perceptions of forest activities. This study aimed to identify fast-growing forest plantation owner types based on socioeconomic factors and assess if these types matched with different forest management practices and attitudes toward forest promotion policies in South America. Using a case of study in Argentina, we carried out surveys among Eucalyptus forest owners (n = 74). We categorized them based on their production activities, forest plantation area, and years in forestry using Principal Component Analysis and cluster analysis. Following, we associated these groups with forest management variables and national promotion policies using indicator species analysis. We delineated eight groups: Large, Small and Integrated Forest Owners; Longstanding and New Agricultural-cattle ranching Forest Owners; Large and Small multi productive Forest Owners; and Citrus Forest Owners. Extra-forest productive activities emerged as the most influential variable in constructing our typology. Larger groups tended to exhibit significant associations with innovative management practices, while smaller groups did not. Longstanding forest owners favored maintaining traditional practices, whereas new recommendations were adopted primarily by newer owners. Overall, there was a general trend, but some groups exhibited non-linear associations, suggesting a combined effect of producer size, experience on forestry and productive culture.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to sensitivity but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the forest owner's voluntary predisposition, professionals from the industrial-forest sector and forest owners’ organizations by helping to link with the forest owners. We also would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.
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Partial financial support was received from the Scientific and Technological Research Project entitled “Forestry policies and their effects on the development of the forestry-industrial sector in the Mesopotamian region” (PICT 2017-1657, National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation, Argentina).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by MPB, SLB, CS and MFA. The first draft of the manuscript was written by MPB. The first writing—review and editing were performed by SLB and NIG, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Plaza Behr, M.C., Serra, C., Arturi, M.F. et al. Characterizing owners of fast-growing forest plantations in South America’s afforestation systems. New Forests (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11056-024-10038-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11056-024-10038-w