Abstract
Tree retention is the practice of leaving trees on clearcuts to benefit biodiversity, introduced as a conservation tool in Sweden a few decades ago, to supplement and partly decrease the need for protected areas. It is today applied in production forests around the world, making it good examples of an ´ecosystem approach´ in practice. Although conducted at every final harvest in Sweden since more than 15 years, and implying costs for forest owners of at least 1 billion SEK per year, a thorough evaluation taking into account ecological, economic and social aspects is still lacking. We are a multidisciplinary team (ecology, landscape architecture, political science, remote sensing) that will approach the issue from different perspectives, in cooperation with stake-holders. The integration will be guaranteed through common research arenas (shared field sites, joint use of visualizations). A professional communicator will coordinate the knowledge dissemination. The results will be applicable to the 240 000 Swedish forest owners and on the hundreds of thousands of hectares that are harvested each year. The results will also be of strategic interest to policy-making since they will either reject or sustain the current Swedish forest conservation policy with conservation actions taken on multiple scales. Since Sweden was a pioneer in tree retention improved knowledge will be of interest to also other parts of the world.
Sweden