Policy change implications for forest water protection in Sweden over the last 50 years

Abstract

Improving water quality has become an important environmental issue, spurred in part by the Water Framework Directive. However, the relationship of policy change with forest water protection measures is relatively unknown. We analyzed how policy and practice have developed in Sweden using 50 years of historic data from the Krycklan Catchment Study, focusing on riparian buffers. Corresponding to legislation, education and voluntary measures emphasizing stream protection, two step changes occurred; between the 1970s-1980s, buffers increased by 67%, then by 100% between 1990s and 2000s. By 2013, just 50% of the stream length affected by forestry was protected and the application has varied by stream size; small streams lacked a buffer approximately 65% of the time, while 90% of large streams had buffers. The doubling of buffer implementation from the 1990s-2000s corresponded to the adoption of a number of environmental protection policies in the 1990s that all came into effect during this period.

Cutting Edge: A Comparison of Contemporary Practices of Riparian Buffer Retention Around Small Streams in Canada, Finland, and Sweden

“…Bringing awareness to this problem is the first step to attain good ecological and biochemical status of all waters, and good conservation status for water‐related habitat types as required by, for example, the EU Water Framework Directive and EU Habitats Directive. It remains questionable, however, whether practices can be improved in jurisdictions where soft regulatory (voluntary) guidelines are driving buffer allocation (Sweden and Finland—Hasselquist et al, 2019). Although riparian buffers were not wider in BC, we present evidence that hard regulations (i.e., the operation‐free zone) are mostly followed there.…”

“…Finally, small streams do not present recreational‐fishing possibilities, and thus, protecting their habitat for cold‐water adapted species (e.g., salmonids) is not prioritized (Olson et al, 2007). Overall the ecological and/or biochemical importance of small streams on both local and downstream scales has been underappreciated by land managers in the past (Hasselquist et al, 2019; Kuglerová et al, 2017). However, small streams are important at the catchment scale.…”

“…Although many researchers and government agencies have speculated for a long time that small streams are neglected when allocating buffers (Hylander et al, 2002; Kuglerová et al, 2017), there are very few data on regional scales to test this contention. Only a few local reports (Ahonen, 2017, in Finnish; Olsson, 2009, in Swedish) or studies conducted within single catchments (Hasselquist et al, 2019) have somehow evaluated buffer presence (or width) around small streams. Scientific evidence is needed to understand the current status of riparian protection for small streams, especially if we aim to protect our water resources from sources to outlets in landscapes managed for production forestry.…”

The Net Landscape Carbon Balance—Integrating terrestrial and aquatic carbon fluxes in a managed boreal forest landscape in Sweden

“…Based on a 90 year rotation period, this approach resulted in an average annual clear‐cut area of 56 ha. In the second approach, the long‐term average of the annually harvested area was determined based on identifying new clear‐cuts on air‐photographs during each decade between 1963 and 2013 (Hasselquist, Mancheva, Eckerberg, & Laudon, ). The total clear‐cut area during 1963–2013 was 2,630 ha resulting in an annual clear‐cutting rate of 53 ha/year.…”

From Haymaking to Wood Production: Past Use of Mires in Northern Sweden Affect Current Ecosystem Services and Function

“…To explore more recent conditions, we used data sets gathered for other studies with modern remote-sensing methods and made available through the Krycklan Catchment. Land cover in 1963 ( Figure 2f) and 2013 ( Figure 2h) had been classified from aerial photographs by a well-trained analyst from the Swedish National Forest Inventory (NFI), who defined polygons and classified them into standard land classes (Hasselquist et al, 2019). Also, most of the ditches of the area had been mapped and quantified using a 0.5 × 0.5 m digital terrain model (DTM) derived from a LiDAR flight from 2015 (Hasselquist et al, 2018).…”