Private forest owners in Sweden and other countries are becoming an increasingly heterogeneous group as regards their experience and knowledge of forestry. Over the past decade, a number of studies have been conducted with the aim of describing different aspects of forest owners. However, little attention has been paid to the owners' self-activity and how they learn. With the overall aim of exploring the relationship between self-activity and knowledge to use it as a starting point for new recommendations for planned communication towards forest owners, this study examines the extent and type of the work different categories of private forest owners perform, and from whom or where they learn. An analysis of data from a mail questionnaire and from the Database for Forest Owner Analysis showed that self-activity is common in all categories of owners but more frequent among male and resident forest owners. Forest owners have relatively few knowledge sources. Besides being self-taught, the most common ways of learning are from their fathers and from attending forest days. The study also shows a strong connection between self-activity and self-estimated knowledge of forestry. The recommendation for communication planning is therefore to use the extent and type of self-activity among different groups of forest owners as a point of departure for planning communication strategies.
In Sweden, as in other countries with a growing and increasingly diverse population of forest owners, there is an apparent need for more detailed quantitative data of high quality in order to describe and understand present forest conditions and predict and explain future trends. Therefore, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has developed a Data Base for Forest Owner Analysis (DBFOA) by combining existing forest measurement statistics, gathered on a regular basis by the Swedish Forest Agency since 1992, with records of the individual forest owners. The database consists of selfreported measurement statistics in terms of cuttings, cleaning, scarification and planting from about 30,000 forest management units. It includes information on the owner age, gender, residential proximity to the management unit and the extent of work undertaken by the owner. From 1999 it also indicates whether the forest is certified. This paper demonstrates the use of the database by presenting results from (1) a comparison of management practices on properties that are certified with those that are not, and (2) an examination of how the area of planting and final felling have changed from 1999 to 2006 in total and between male and female forest owners. Results from the first analysis show that the willingness to certify increases with the size of the forest property and also that harvesting activities are more frequent on certified than non-certified properties. The second analysis, show a higher ratio of final felling during 2003-2006 on properties owned by women than properties owned by men.
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