Composing landscape level forest plans for forest areas under multiple private ownership

This study illustrates planning approaches available for forest planning concerning multiple private ownership, referred to here as regional planning. These approaches are necessary because of ecological reasons: evaluating the habitat quality of several species requires examining the forest landscape within areas larger than a single forest holding. Forest holdings are administratively delineated and do not coincide with habitat patches, which leads to interdependencies between forest holdings. The basic planning approaches applied in this study were the top-down, bottom-up and integrated approaches. In the top-down approach, the landscape-level plan was prepared according to landscape-level objectives, ignoring the holding-level objectives. In the bottom-up approach, the landscape-level plan was created by selecting the best combination among already accepted forest plan alternatives first created for each holding. In the integrated approach, landscape-level and forest-holding-level objectives were considered simultaneously in the same optimization model. It was concluded that a general ranking of the approaches is impossible because different planning situations emphasize different requirements. The ranking of approaches depends on the comparison criteria and the planning situation. It is also possible to use several approaches in one planning situation.