Spatial allocation of forest production

The question of how production of different services and goods should be combined or allocated spatially is an issue that often have been discussed during the evolution of the concept multiple-use forestry. Basically there are two different approaches: the first, that of joint production of several goods and services from the same area, and the second, that of specialized production of single outputs from different areas. As forestry is an activity that ranges over a long time period and as values of forests changes over time there are temporal aspects on this spatial allocation problem that have to be considered. The objective of the thesis is to analyse some important factors for spatial allocation of forest production and the temporal aspects on spatial allocation of forest production. The thesis is based on four studies. In the first paper it is concluded that habitat protection for nature conservation purposes, in areas dominated by non-industrial private forestry, will have socio- economic implications, since there is a variation in habitat occurrence between estates. The second paper results show that there is a significant potential to increase biomass production in Sweden through the use of nutrient optimisation. The potential could be used for increasing the production of forest fuels and/or raw materials for the forest industries. It could also be utilized in order to provide opportunities for setting aside more areas for nature conservation purposes, without the potential harvest levels being reduced. In the third paper, the implications of two different strategies for increasing the fraction of deciduous trees in a forest landscape are studied. The study shows, it takes a long time to change the forest composition in a landscape and if a major increase in deciduous fraction should be reached, drastic management measures are needed. The last paper presents a method for the analysis of production allocation problems. The method is used to evaluate two different strategies for the spatial allocation of wood production and production of nature conservation values. The results reported show that the use of specialized production leads to a higher production of the two outputs as compared to the use of joint production. However, if the goals of forestry change in the future, the use of specialized production could imply a more restricted future planning space