Forest management scenarios and their effects on ecosystem services : some analytical results from Sweden

Sweden has just more than 23 million hectares of productive forest, which has been actively managed for more than 100 years. This has led to one of the recognized forest products exporting country. Despite the vital role of forests in providing forest products in sustaining various human needs, there is an increasing demand for the inclusion of ecosystem services in forest planning decision making. Today, methods in conventional assessments on forest growth, yield and harvest are facing changes due to extended interests in the assessments on overall forestry systems effects on ecosystem services including carbon balance of the system. Recently, integrated approaches that have concepts of forest science, wood material science, energy science and cleaner productions have been used in the field of forestry to assess the important role of forestry in reducing carbon emissions. This paper uses a system analysis approach to perform a model based analysis that includes forest management and their effects on different indicators of ecosystem services in Swedish forest landscape