Scottish Forestry

There have been significant changes to farming and forestry, and new strategies for agriculture, forestry and biodiversity have been launched. The influence of farming and forestry on Scotland's landscapes is seen as increasingly important, and new access rights have been put in place by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. Although these changes bring uncertainty and challenges, they also bring a major opportunity to move decisively towards integrating landscape, biodiversity and recreational objectives in land management. This book takes stock of the changes taking places and considers a number of case studies, which together suggest that progress is being made, looks ahead at future research and advisory needs, and highlights some key challenges to achieving better integration in the future.

This book presents up-to-date information about Scotland's native woodlands. It draws upon professional experience of scientific research, survey and management, where the author has studied many important native woodlands in Scotland and beyond.

Forest related social values such as recreation values are growing in importance in North European countries. Our urbanized societies need social services from forests and other nature areas. One of the key ecosystem services is the recreation environment provided by forests. Possibilities to enhance commercial recreational use of forests has been recognized, particularly among private forest owners, who have new opportunities for new types of forest-related entrepreneurship. This report provides a review of social indicators in forestry, particularly concerning nature-based recreation and tourism in North European countries. The common interest among scientists and other experts was to discuss how to develop social indicators and to monitor changes to social benefits in forestry and forest use. In all countries, there is a challenge to develop monitoring systems to produce inventory data for statistics that are required in a way that provid es comparable social indicators. It is timely to enhance standardization and harmonization of social indicators for monitoring and management of sustainable forestry and forest use, and for sustainable nature-based recreation and tourism.