Practical application of disturbance based management in the forest company SCA in the northern part of Sweden.

Abstract

The forest owned by SCA is situated in the northern part of Sweden within the boreal zone. This session will describe how natural disturbance is emulated within practical forest management today and also present a historical overview of the development during the last three decades. The focus is on how the ASIO-model has been applied within SCA, a model that is based on different levels of natural fire disturbance intensities. The soil moisture and vegetation types typically vary largely on a small scale within northern part of Sweden. Hence, the natural forest fire disturbance intensity varies largely from “extremely rare” on wet sites typically dominated by Picea abies, to “often” on dry sites, which typically is dominated by pine, Pinus sylvestris. The presentation will describe how this model has been applied in practical forest management depending on soil moisture and forest type. Parts of the ASIO-model referring to wet and dry sites has had large importance not only within retention forestry but more so in managing stands for maintaining or increasing biodiversity with high conservation values, for instance the set-aside areas.