What is closer to nature than the forest? About private owners' perception of their forests

Ecologically sound forest management is deemed the guiding model of forest politics in the last decade. As the concept is to be universally applied, also forests owned by non-industrial private persons gain attention, especially because experts in administration and science assess in particular the smaller private forests as being in relatively bad conditions. This leads to the question if this characterization of the situation meets with the perceptions of the private owners themselves. Based on a socio-psychological model, this paper develops hypotheses regarding the perceptions and assessments of non-industrial private forest owners. The analysis of two surveys among app. 1500 non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany, is used to review these assumptions. Of main importance are the perceptions of forest owners regarding the condition of their forests (Fig. I and 2), their forest management (Tab. 6), the state of the own forest (Tab. 5 and 7), their preferences (Tab. 2, 3 and 4) and the assessment of own possibilities to influence forest condition parameters (Tab. 8). It becomes evident that NIPF owners extensively internalize the discourse of ecologically sound management and close-to-nature forestry. Their preferences are not only coined by these influences of society but also by the context of the surrounding landscape and structural factors such as their professional orientation. The condition of the own forest is described as close-to-nature which is in contrast to the view of experts in administration and research. It can be concluded that the extensive windthrows in the 1990s introduced a change in awareness of the forest owners.