In remote sensing-based forest inventories, forest information is typically predicted at the grid cell level. For operational use this information is aggregated into larger management units. The aggregation simplifies the planning process leading to a loss of fine-scale spatial information and potentially reducing decision quality. Using individual cells as management units could preserve quality of the information but remains...

Forestry is often directed towards conflicting targets. In Finland, forest policy has aimed to extract as much timber as possible while ensuring continued future harvesting opportunities. Concurrently, there is a social demand for biodiversity and non-timber ecosystem services. To explore the opportunities to combine these interests we simulated forest growth and optimized forestry, for a 100 year period, under two scenarios....

Data acquisition for sustainable forest management has focused on obtaining high quality information to estimate biomass. Improving the quality of non-timber sustainability indicators, like deadwood volume, has been a minor interest. To explore how inventory approaches could be improved, we applied a Global Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis (GUSA) to evaluate which factors propagate more errors in deadwood modelling and how...

Mitigating future forest risks, safeguarding timber revenues and improving biodiversity are key considerations for current boreal forest management. Alternatives to rotation forestry likely have an important role, but how they will perform under a changing climate remains unclear. We used a boreal forest growth simulator to explore how variations on traditional clear-cutting, in rotation length, thinning intensity, and increas...

Purpose of Review Boreal forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services that are important to society. The boreal biome is experiencing the highest rates of warming on the planet and increasing demand for forest products. Here, we review how changes in climate and its associated extreme events (e.g., windstorms) are putting at risk the capacity of these forests to continue providing ecosystem services. We further analyze t...

Forests provide a wide variety of ecosystem services (ES) to society. The boreal biome is experiencing the highest rates of warming on the planet and increasing demand for forest products. To foresee how to maximize the adaptation of boreal forests to future warmer conditions and growing demands of forest products, we need a better understanding of the relative importance of forest management and climate change on the supply o...

Landscape multifunctionality, a widely accepted challenge for boreal forests, aims to simultaneously provide timber, non-timber ecosystem services, and shelter for biodiversity. However, multifunctionality requires the use of novel forest management regimes optimally combined over the landscape, and an increased share of sets asides. It remains unclear how this combination will shape stand vulnerability to wind disturbances an...

COVID-19 crisis has emphasized how poorly prepared humanity is to cope with global disasters. However, this crisis also offers a unique opportunity to move towards a more sustainable and equitable future. Here, we identify the underlying environmental, social, and economic chronic causes of the COVID-19 crisis. We argue in favour of a holistic view to initiate a socio-economic transition to improve the prospects for global sus...

There is ample evidence that intensive management of ecosystems causes declines in biodiversity as well as in multiple ecosystem services, i.e., in multifunctionality. However, less is known about the permanence and reversibility of these responses. To gain insight into whether multifunctionality can be sustained under intensive management, we developed a framework building on the concept of resilience: a system’s ability to a...

Developing environmental conservation plans involves assessing trade-offs between the benefits and costs of conservation. The benefits of conservation can be established with ecological inventories or estimated based on previously collected information. Conducting ecological inventories can be costly, and the additional information may not justify these costs. To clarify the value of these inventories, we investigate the multi...

Article impact statement : Incorporating landowner preferences in prioritization schemes may not improve conservation efficiency.