Supervision of the district governor over forest management in forests not owned by the State Treasury in Poland

Abstract

Motives: Due to the gradual increase in the area of privately owned forests in Poland, the system of supervision of forest management requires strengthening. Aim: The purpose of this paper is to present selected problems related to the functioning of the forest management supervision system in forests not owned by the State Treasury in Poland. Results: The significant fragmentation of privately owned forest plots and their dispersion require incentives from the state administration to create entities associating their owners and fuse forest land into larger complexes. The measures taken could consist in ensuring the possibility of such entities applying for co-financing of forest management from European Union funds or the state budget. The result of such an approach would be to increase the forest area in Poland and to facilitate the necessary tree breeding and protection works in forests not owned by the State Treasury. However, this cannot be achieved without the necessary legislative changes and parallel measures to increase the knowledge on how to conduct sustainable forest management among private forest owners.