Navigating trade-offs across ownership and ecological priorities in forest conservation planning

Forests play a central role in biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. In Europe, recent policies place strong emphasis on forest restoration and the expansion of strictly protected areas. Yet decision making is complicated by conflicting and unclear objectives, fragmented governance, and the predominance of private forest ownership. A key unresolved problem is how to design spatially coherent and socially feasible strategies to expand strict forest protection under real-world ownership and policy constraints. Here, we use systematic conservation planning to design and evaluate alternative scenarios for achieving the EU 10% strict protection target in forest areas. Using North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany, as a case study, we develop two pathways-prioritizing either large wilderness areas or habitat representation-implemented through five scenarios that differ in ownership structures, conservation objectives, and existing economic incentives. Our results show that these pathways entail clear trade-offs. Although wilderness-oriented scenarios maximize spatial compactness, they tend to represent fewer areas of high ecological value. The pathway focused more on habitat representation can better capture areas of high ecological value, but achieving this requires substantial involvement of private forests. Compared to approaches focusing solely on public land, integrating private ownership through incentive-based mechanisms markedly improves ecological representativeness, but only under high participation rates. Our results highlight the trade-offs inherent in expanding strict forest protection and show that conservation outcomes critically depend on ownership structures, participation rates, and scenario-specific objectives. By integrating these factors into spatially explicit planning, the framework can guide the design of strategies that balance habitat representation, wilderness, and stakeholder interests, helping to achieve EU conservation targets more effectively.