A hidden scale dependency in conserving working woodlands
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science, Conservation Biology, Environmental Sciences, Science Policy, Coupled Natural and Human Systems
- Keywords
- forest management, parcelisation, land-use change, commentary
- Copyright
- © 2015 Lazarus et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. A hidden scale dependency in conserving working woodlands. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1333v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1333v1
Abstract
Because plans for large-scale landscape preservation in the US do not rely exclusively on lands held in trust, conservation programs have a vested interest in forest stewardship by private landowners. Selective harvests for commercial sale are often highlighted as a financial incentive for owners of non-industrial "family forests" to sustainably maintain the working character of their acreage rather than subdivide it or convert it for development. However, the business costs inherent in even a small-scale commercial timber harvest typically mean that forest parcels smaller than approximately 80 acres are too small to support a financial return. Statistics for private forest ownership in the U.S. suggest this minimum scale makes commercial harvest incentives effectively inaccessible to more than 90% of forest owners. Rural landscape conservation and commercial timber harvests depend on the same economies of scale to be viable. Designs for regional-scale forest conservation need to account for non-industrial but nonetheless commercial economies of scale that set an inherent limit on financial incentives intended to foster stewardship activity among family-forest landowners.
Author Comment
This piece is a brief commentary on a problem that commercial forestry practitioners and landscape conservationists have in common. At present, it is not under consideration at a peer-reviewed journal.