According to new research, improved communications and financial assistance could encourage private forest owners to engage more willingly in forest management. Personal economics, moral obligations, traditional ideas of how a forest should look and fear of forest fires were found to influence whether forest owners participate in management activities.

Reducing forest fire risk within a tight budget can be successfully achieved, according to researchers. The study simulated the economic and fire risk effects of five management plans and found that a combination of removing low level trees and selective positioning of woodland produced the most economic and least destructive results

A study of two forest ecosystems in Spain has found that land-cover maps of watersheds, ecosystems hosting key interactions between vegetation, wildlife, and water, are made more accurate by the inclusion of LiDAR data — a type of remote sensing that pulses laser light at a target to measure vertical distances for use in 3D-mapping an environment. This has important implications for ecosystem monitoring, flood mitigation, and forest management, fields in which accurately characterising an environment is key.

New research on sustainable forest management (SFM) initiatives in Russia and Sweden has indicated that the main challenges to SFM are combining top-down and bottom up approaches to management, coordinating the different sectors involved and including all actors and stakeholders.

Forest management could help adaptation to climate change through its effects on water supply. A long-term US-based study has analysed the impact of forested land use changes on water flow into streams and rivers. It indicated that converting forests from deciduous to pine trees could help water storage in extreme wet conditions, but may be unsuitable in droughts. As such, it recommends tailoring management decisions to the context.

Controlled fires could help the regeneration capacity of some insects in regions of intensively managed forests, according to a recent study of Finnish forests that are part of an EU LIFE restoration project. Results indicated that fire can be an effective conservation measure but its impact depends on the region???s history and context.

A new report suggests that while many countries are getting better at managing their tropical forests, deforestation remains a very real danger.

This report examines public perspectives on disturbance-based management conducted in the central Cascade Range in Oregon as part of the Blue River Landscape Strategy.

A recurrent theme in the development of U.S. forest policies has been the assertion of strong positive relations among communities, economies, and natural resource management. Now as a new round of federal land management planning is getting underway, questions are being raised about the strength of that assertion and how to view communities following a decade of reduced federal harvests. This report examines these questions considering the 433 communities in six Bureau of Land Management districts in western Oregon. It discusses the ways that forest-based communities have been considered in the context of federal forest management planning, and it summarizes information on socioeconomic conditions and trends for communities in western Oregon.

Until women are provided adequate access to information, both about their rights and available budgetary resources, Joint Forest Management (JFM) programmes will only lead to more disempowerment for them, says Madhu Sarin.

Bennett, Brett M., 1983-