Speaker
Description
In Sweden, half of the forestland is owned by approximately 300,000 individual private forest owners. In total, they spend about 11 million work hours per year on forest management activities in their forests. Each to fulfill their own personal goals with forest ownership. Typical activities are planting, pre-commercial thinning and undergrowth clearance. Contractors are often hired for logging, meaning that forest owners also are customers of forestry services and need to evaluate who to contract and be able to assess the services provided. Today, this is often done subjectively and not based on objective information. This not only risks poorer target achievement for the procured services, but also generally gives an incomplete picture of service quality. Many of today's private forest owners lack forestry education and experience but are motivated to take advantage of most of the forest's values and protect high cultural and environmental values. One way to make it easier for small-scale forest owners to make good decisions and achieve high goal fulfillment is to innovate and implement new user-friendly tools such as digital decision support. The objective of this study was thus to identify and quantify the needs for digital decision support that can improve forest owners' purchasing skills when procuring forest services and facilitate the implementation and evaluation of forestry activities they carry out themselves. Data on forest owners’ current perceptions and use of digital decision support was collected through a questionnaire that was sent out to 1495 randomly selected non-industrial private owners in Sweden. The response rate was about 25% (n=366). The results show that about one third of the responding forest owners today use digital decision support for one or several purposes. The most common use was when assessing the need for forestry management measures on the forest property, and as a support when contracting service providers. About 40% of the users used digital decision support when following up on actions taken or as support when carrying out forestry work themselves. Almost as many used it for selecting the best management option based on their goals. Most users experience that digital decision support saves them time compared to other approaches, and that it contributes to better decisions and increased quality. Among non-users, it was more common for them to feel that they lacked the necessary skills to use digital decision support than that their use would be limited by a lack of technical conditions. Moreover, many non-users did not believe that digital decision support would make it easier for them to adapt their forestry to their goals. The study concludes that there is great potential to increase the use of digital decision support among small-scale forest owners, but that both educational and information efforts are needed to increase knowledge and raise awareness of the existence and benefits of these tools. By highlighting the needs of different types of forest owners, this study can contribute to the development of practically applicable digital support systems that can simplify and rationalize the forest owner’s work.
| Keywords | NIPF; Survey; Digitalization; Forestry |
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