Lessons to be learned from how continuous cover forestry historically emerged in Sweden – a review

Continuous cover forestry (CCF) is an environmentally friendly and sustainable management alternative to rotation forest management (RFM). In Sweden, both management types have coexisted in early forest history but in the last 80 years industrial RFM involving clearfelling and replanting completely dominated. Our review focused particularly on the early CCF era between 1870 and 1960 before the large-scale introduction and institutionalization of RFM. One of the dominant management methods of this historic phase was a form of exploitative target-diameter harvesting (also referred to as creaming and high grading), i.e. a traditional variant of timber mining targeting large, good quality trees without demographic or structural considerations. In many parts of Sweden, this method eventually resulted in low density and low productivity forests. With time, these outcomes caused a professional trauma, which in turn gradually gave rise to a fierce opposition of CCF in general, and paved the way towards industrial RFM. Similar unavoidable disappointments by early CCF attempts have also occurred in other European countries, however, with different responses. The Swedish Forestry Model, a national RFM variant, has recently been challenged by the Swedish society and ongoing climate change, energy crises and environmental trends triggered a process of reconsidering the application of CCF in the country. Together with blurred terminology, the traumatic historic CCF experience along with periods of timber shortage still act as a major hindrance for the uptake of CCF in Sweden and there is a need to overcome this mental barrier. In this context, surviving CCF experiments and management demonstration plots from the previous CCF era offer the unique opportunity to analyse, learn and anticipate future forest development scenarios.