共 The forest industry is characterized by long-term investments, with returns often not achieved for several years or decades. Forest management must also take account of biodiversity conservation and other ecosystem services provided by forests. This book explores and assesses historic and future outlooks as well as current tradeoffs and methods, in order to help decision makers to handle the increasing complexity of future forest management.
It emphasizes the generality and complexity in evidence-based forest management, illustrated with empirical data from the Fennoscandia region and internationally. It first investigates, from a historical perspective, how previous forest policies and discourses have influenced current forest policy and management. Secondly, it explores methods to realise alternative forest futures and how the results from such investigations may influence the present. Thirdly, it examines current methods of balancing tradeoffs in decision-making among ecosystem services, and how these methods relate to both what can be learnt from the past and what is expected from the future.
In a concluding section the three parts are synthesized and discussed in the context of general natural resource management. Overall the book contributes novel and significant interdisciplinary knowledge across temporal perspectives, which will be increasingly important in future forest management characterized by dynamism and the need for alternative and adaptive management strategies.
