This issue of Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research is proud to present a selection of articles from an international conference on climate change. The contributions are described in the preface by Niels Elers Koch, Frank S⊘ndergaard Jensen and Katrine Hahn Kristensen.
The following is the editor's own condensed summary of the other articles in issue 24.6.
Early genetic selection for wood quality traits in Norway spruce has a good chance to succeed. Daniel Gräns and co-authors found high heritability, as well as high age-age correlation, for wood stiffness, wood density and micro fibril angle. These traits are all important for wood quality. The study was made on Norway spruce, and it also indicated that early selection for volume implies a risk for reduced wood quality.
Frank Götmark asked private forest owners if they had experienced conflicts when the authorities had detected woodland key habitats on their properties. The key habitats imply restrictions of various sorts with respect to forest utilization. Conflicts were reported by over one fifth of the respondents. The conflicts could be due to rules for cutting, protection and compensation. Owners experiencing conflicts were generally younger or had larger areas with key habitats.
Atte Komonen described the characteristics of the riparian zones along lake-shores in central Sweden, and found them to be distinct from the upland, managed forest. The riparian zones differed in species composition, number of dead trees, and density of under-storey trees. The buffer zones along lakes constitute an important element in the landscape heterogeneity.
Deadwood is not randomly occurring in a forest stand. Instead, it is often aggregated, creating local patches of coarse woody debris. Anna-Liisa Ylisirniö and co-authors studied the spatial distribution of deadwood in old-growth spruce forests in northern Finland. They also found that the wood-dependent fungi varied with the presence of deadwood, but also with other stand characteristics.
Airborne laser scanner provides a method to make forest inventories of large areas at a relatively low cost. The method has developed in recent years, allowing more fine-tuned and accurate inventories. In this article, Matti Maltamo and co-authors show a method which enables stand diameter distributions to be reliably predicted.