ESC-strategy for rational operationalization of forest biodiversity maintenance in Finland

Since the introduction of the idea of sustainability in the human use of natural resources, there have been profound changes in the operating environment of commercial forestry also in Finland. Despite that grand goals are set and different ‘green policies’ adopted, only seldom there is any consensus among different interest groups about the real contribution of these performances to sustainability of the activity itself. Evidently, the ultimate task for forestry related projects in the recently initiated multidiciplinary research program (Finnish Biodiversity Research Programme – FIBRE, Academy of Finland) is to construct firm prerequisites for this consensus to grow. The purpose of this paper is above all to bridge the gap between societal demand for rationality in forest biodiversity conservation acts, and the point that natural state of ecosystems is often considered as the only acceptable model for nature conservation. At first we give a brief overview of the control mechanisms and regulations concerning relations between forestry and the maintenance of forest biodiversity in Finland. Regarding to different components of biological diversity, it seems that the defined goals of these control mechanisms are adequately extensive. Their operationalization, however, is unsatisfactory and also biased towards a certain subset of species due to some problems relating to the structure of managed forest landscape. These problems are discussed in their own chapters. By accounting also the social and economical considerations of sustainability, a feasible operational approach for forest biodiversity maintenance must base on both the spatial allocation of maintenance responsibilities and, depending on site-specific parameters in the target area, the clustering of species’ resources. In the latter part of the paper we present a preliminary idea of a dynamic ESC-strategy for country-wide maintenance of biodiversity in managed forests. In the strategy forest species are divided according to the best achievable occurrence of their populations (E stands for ‘Everywhere’, i.e. species occur in practically all suitable managed forest habitats; S stands for ‘Somewhere’, i.e. species occur only in some proportion of suitable managed forest habitats; and C-species are able to occur almost exclusively only ‘in Conservation areas’). This best achievable occurrence or ‘ecological optimum for managed forests’ is constrained by socio-economic aspects of sustainable forest management.