Abstract
Swedish forest growth can be increased through intensive forestry practices, enabling an increased use of forest biomass for climate-change mitigation. However, the diffusion of such practices depends on the forest owners’ adoption of them. We study Swedish private forest owners’ perceptions and intentions with respect to increasing forest growth by adopting exotic tree species. The results of a mail-in questionnaire survey show that although a majority of forest owners desire increasing forest growth, most owners have only a basic understanding of exotic tree species and a smaller proportion is interested in adopting them. The intention to adopt exotics seems to depend on the perceived performance of the species with respect to the economic aspects of forest management rather than on environmental or recreational concerns. Whereas a knowledge gap among the private forest owners regarding how to increase forest growth is implied, forest owners with higher self-rated knowledge of forestry and exotics have stronger intentions to adopt such species.
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Notes
Attitudes are considered to possess the three components: affective (emotions or feelings), cognitive (beliefs) and behavioural (response tendencies). This paper primarily evaluates the cognitive component of attitudes, which consists of perceptions (beliefs or knowledge) of the attributes of a phenomenon (e.g. how an exotic tree species performs with respect to forest growth). Although the other components of forest owner attitudes are not analysed here, all three components of an attitude are generally consistent (Hawkins et al. 2007).
Factor analysis is based on the assumption that all variables are correlated to a certain degree. Variables that are correlated with one another but largely independent of other subsets of variables are combined into factors (Tabachnick and Fidell 2006).
In terms of species, the largest number of ‘do not know’ answers involved Sitka spruce (a mean value for the consequences for forest management of 60 % ‘do not know’ answers). In terms of consequences for the forest management, the greatest number of ‘do not know’ answers was regarding performance with respect to nitrogen leakage (a mean value across the species of 60 % ‘do not know’ answers) followed by performance with respect to vulnerability to insect and fungi attacks (a mean value of 55 %).
The regression equations controlled for whether the respondent resided in Sweden’s northern (SE3) NUTS (nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) region or in the east or south (SE1 and SE2). This division of Sweden follows approximately the 60th parallel.
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The financial support of the European Union, the county administrative board of Jämtland, Sveaskog, SCA Forest Products, Norrskog and Jämtkraft is acknowledged.
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Communicated by Martin Moog.
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Hemström, K., Mahapatra, K. & Gustavsson, L. Swedish private forest owners’ perceptions and intentions with respect to adopting exotic tree species. Eur J Forest Res 132, 433–444 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-013-0682-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-013-0682-5