Practice examples

In Europe there is a multitude of different political frameworks and also a broad variety of sociocultural backgrounds. It is very clear that there is not one solution to the demands to supply a variety of ecosystem services and the challenges posed by the diverse conditions in different regions. The case studies in part C have been selected to represent the broad spectrum across different gradients and show how enterprises deal with challenges to provide different ecosystem services.

The examples are clustered into six different groups according to the main forest functions: Timber production forests in lowland areas (C1–C5); Timber production in mountainous areas (C6–C10); Intensive forest management (with focus on timber production) (C11–C20); Protection against natural hazards (C21–C25); Tourism and scenic beauty and densely settled areas, cities, and urban landscapes (C26–C29); and Managing for species diversity and habitat maintenance (C30– C32). There are, of course, overlaps and some case studies do not clearly fit into only one group. However, we hope to illustrate that the different conditions and demands call for different approaches.

We are well aware that that we can only cover a fraction of the diversity of approaches and there are certainly other functions that have not been covered by the selected examples. The authors of the case studies in part C were asked to fill a table with the aim of representing in which ecosystem function resources and capacities are invested. To guarantee a certain common understanding of the terminology across borders, we defined nine ecosystem services and products – according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment MEA (see introduction): Timber/Biomass (T/B), Non-timber products (NTP), Erosion (E), Protection (P), Biodiversity (B), Recreation (R), Landscape (L), Climate (C), and Groundwater (G). We asked the forest managers to estimate how much of their total capacity is invested in each service function. This resulted in a very rough overview of the priorities in the different cases based on the estimations of the authors.