Integrating data from National Forest Inventories into socio-cultural forest monitoring – a new approach

ABSTRACT

Information about social aspects of forest is frequently collected with questionnaire surveys. Several countries conduct nation-wide surveys in order to monitor outdoor recreation and the relationship of the people to the forest. While this gives a representative picture of the respondents’ preferences and activities, it is not possible to link their answers to the real characteristics of the forest they are describing. On the other hand, forest characteristics are commonly recorded in National Forest Inventories (NFIs). Concerning forest recreation, both the physical characteristics of the forest as well as the social aspects play an important role. To establish a link between socio-cultural forest monitoring and the Swiss NFI, we used photos taken in all four cardinal directions from the centre of the NFI sample plots. The photos were integrated in an online survey dealing with visual attractiveness of forest. Forest characteristics were derived from the photos according to NFI-criteria. An evaluation of this method revealed that most parameters studied could be deducted reliably from the photos. Results show that visual attractiveness could be explained by a combination of several NFI-parameters and social factors. We conclude that this approach is a possibility to integrate forest characteristics into socio-cultural forest monitoring.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual attractiveness of forest
• linkage of physical and social data
• photo interpretation
• visitor preferences
• forest characteristics

Acknowledgements

We thank Christoph Düggelin and Marc Baume for the interpretation of the photographs, Jeremy Dawson for advice on multilevel modelling and two anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. The project was conducted within the Swiss National Forest Inventory. It was funded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI as a contribution to the COST Action FP1204.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN); Swiss Federal Institute of Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL; Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI.