Information Needs of Non-industrial Private Forest Owners After Logging Operations in Finland: A Case Study

In this study, the information needs of non-industrial private forest owners in Finland, after logging operations, were investigated. The study was carried out as an online survey in 2017. The survey was targeted at non-industrial private forest owners who had sold their timber during the previous 10 years (2008–2017) and whose email addresses were in the customer relationship management system of a large wood procurement company in Finland. A response link for the survey was successfully sent to 31,988 forest owners, of whom 3323 replied (response rate: 10.4%). The final study data included 3284 non-industrial private forest owners. The results of the study, which need to be interpreted cautiously due to the low response rate, showed that the forest owners want better-quality reporting after logging operations. Furthermore, the results suggested that gender, age, education, occupational status, place of living, size of, and access to, forest property, and length of, and objectives for, forest ownership have a significant effect on their information needs. Younger, highly-educated, female, urban-living and multi-objective forest owners with larger forest holdings and short forest ownership tenures desired more information. Particularly, the respondents conveyed that they would like more and better information about thinning harvesting result. The results also indicated that when different groups of forest owners call for certain information, there is a need for producing different types of reports after logging operations for different forest owner segments.

     

A General Approach to Model Movement in (Highly) Fragmented Patch Networks

Landscape heterogeneity can often be represented as a series of discrete habitat or resource patches surrounded by a matrix of non-habitat. Understanding how animals move in such networks of patches is important for many theoretical and applied questions. The probability of going from one patch to another is affected in a non-trivial way by the characteristics and location of other patches in the network. Nearby patches can compete as possible destinations, and a particular patch can be shadowed by neighboring patches. We present a way to account for the effects of the spatial configuration of patches in models of space use where individuals alternate between spending time in a patch and moving to other patches in the network. The approach is based on the original derivation of Ovaskainen and Cornell (J Appl Probab 40:557–580, 2003) for a diffusion model that considered all possible ways in which an individual leaving a particular patch can eventually reach another patch before dying or leaving the patch network. By replacing the theoretical results of Ovaskainen and Cornell by other appropriate functions, we provide generality and thus make their approach useful in contexts where diffusion is not a good approximation of movement. Furthermore, we provide ways to estimate time spent in the non-habitat matrix when going from patch to patch and implement a method to incorporate the effect of the history of previous visits on future patch use. We present an MCMC way to fit these models to data and illustrate the approach with both simulated data and data from sheep moving among seasonally flooded meadows in northern Patagonia.Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online.     

Density-dependent vole damage in silviculture and associated economic losses at a nationwide scale

Voles inflict damage to silviculture by debarking or severing tree seedlings. The large-scale impacts of vole damage to silviculture, both in terms of severity and financial losses are, however, poorly known. In autumn 2005, cyclically fluctuating vole populations were at their highest in Finland for over 15 years, which led to extensive damage to silviculture during the winter 2005/06. We carried out a nationwide assessment of the incidence, spatial extent and economic value of damage and its relation to vole abundance in privately owned forests during this winter. Damage data were obtained with a questionnaire addressed to the directors of all Forest Management Associations (FMAs) operating in Finland, and vole abundance data from 15 long-term monitoring projects across the country. Voles were confirmed to have destroyed ca. 4.7 million tree seedlings, covering a total effective damage area of ca. 2600 ha. The directors of the FMAs estimated that the actual level of damage was likely to exceed 8.5 million seedlings, or 5400 ha. Roughly 80% of all damage was inflicted on Norway spruce (Picea abies), ca. 10% on Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) and ca. 10% on birch (Betula sp.) and other species. Considering costs of replanting alone, a most likely very conservative estimate of the financial impact of vole damage during the winter 2005/06 lies between 2.2 and 4.0 million €. The occurrence of damage during the winter was positively related to vole abundance in the previous autumn. This validates vole population monitoring as an effective tool for forecasting near-future damage to silviculture. Our results suggest that if vole populations continue to fluctuate as they currently do, levels of damage to Finnish forests will be great also in the future, far exceeding damage levels recorded in earlier decades.     

Seven distinct dietary patterns identified among pregnant Finnish women--associations with nutrient intake and sociodemographic factors

OBJECTIVES: To identify and describe dietary patterns in a cohort of pregnant women and investigate whether the dietary patterns are associated with dietary intake and sociodemographic factors. DESIGN: Mothers entering the Finnish Type 1 Diabetes Prediction and Prevention (DIPP) Nutrition Study in 1997-2002 were retrospectively asked to complete a food-frequency questionnaire concerning their diet during pregnancy. Principal components analysis was used to identify dietary patterns. SETTING: Finland. SUBJECTS: Subjects were 3730 women with a newborn infant carrying increased genetic susceptibility to type 1 diabetes mellitus. RESULTS: Seven factors were identified and named. Energy intake correlated positively with 'Healthy', 'Fast food', 'Traditional bread', 'Traditional meat' and 'Coffee' patterns and inversely with the 'Alcohol and butter' pattern. Intake of dietary fibre correlated positively with 'Healthy', 'Traditional bread' and 'Low-fat foods' patterns and inversely with the 'Alcohol and butter' pattern. The seven dietary patterns seemed to account for relatively large proportions of the variance in energy and nutrient intakes except for the intake of vitamin D, vitamin C, carotenoids and calcium. Maternal age and higher level of education were associated with higher scores on 'Healthy', 'Low-fat foods' and 'Alcohol and butter' patterns. CONCLUSION: Principal components analysis produced seven dietary patterns which may be useful for further research concerning maternal diet and health outcomes among both mothers and their offspring.     

Patterns of abundance and movement in relation to landscape structure: a study of a common scarab (Canthon cyanellus cyanellus) in Southern Mexico

Few relevant data are available to analyze how landscape features affect the abundance and movement patterns of tropical insects. We used mark-release-recapture techniques to study the effects of landscape structure and composition on habitat preferences and movements of Canthon cyanellus cyanellus individuals, within a complex tropical deciduous forest landscape in South Mexico during 2004 and 2005. In total, 2,460 individuals of C. c. cyanellus were captured, including 1,225 females and 1,235 males, out of which 124 individuals (65 females and 59 males) were recaptured once, and 9 individuals (seven females and two males) were recaptured twice. The abundance of individuals was equally high in large forest fragments, small forest fragments and hedgerows, but the abundance in pastures was less than half of the abundance in the other habitat types. To disentangle the movement behaviour of the species from the spatially and temporally varying sampling effort, we applied a Bayesian state-space modelling framework with a diffusion based movement model. Males showed generally faster movement rate than females, and they moved faster within forests and hedgerows than within pastures. Contrary to the assumption of the diffusion model, individuals did not move in a continuous fashion, indicated by the large fraction of individuals that were recaptured in the site of release. However, the posterior predictive data did not deviate substantially from the real data in terms of the mean and maximum movement distances recorded, and in terms of the dependence of movement distance on time between captures. Our results suggest that an important component of the biota in Mexican agro-pasture landscapes can utilize contemporary landscape elements such as hedgerows or small forest fragments in addition to large fragments of remnant habitat. These habitats are still locally common in semi-natural ecosystems and require less intensive conservation management.     

A novel breeding design to produce genetically protected homogenous fish populations for on‐growing

We present a novel KING breeding design to produce genetically protected homogeneous fish material for commercial producers from a breeding nucleus. KING F2‐production population is established from the nucleus, first through full‐sib mating within two unrelated high‐quality families to produce inbred F1‐progeny and then resolving the inbreeding in F2 through mating of the unrelated F1‐individuals. Owing to a small number of founders and the inbred F1‐parents, the remaining additive genetic variance is 37.5% of the original. This restricts the use of F2‐progeny to establish new breeding programmes, thereby protecting the genetic material of the nucleus. The theoretical calculations show that a concomitant decrease of phenotypic variance is possible. However, the reduction is considerable only for traits with high heritability (h² > 0.50). The method was tested with rainbow trout. The results revealed that the mean body weight of the KING‐progeny was similar, but, surprisingly, phenotypic variation (especially due to residual variance) was higher compared with either their outbred control group or the nucleus breeding population. Although further evaluation of this breeding design is needed, the results suggest that while genetic protection is achieved, the efficiency of the method to reduce phenotypic variation is limited for economically important traits with low‐to‐moderate heritability.     

Effects of mammalian herbivores on revegetation of disturbed areas in the forest-tundra ecotone in northern Fennoscandia

Herbivores influence the structure of plant communities in arctic-alpine ecosystems. However, little is known of the effect of herbivores on plant colonisation following disturbance, and on its variability depending on the identity of herbivores and the characteristics of the habitats. To quantify the role of large and small vertebrate herbivores, we established exclosures of two different mesh sizes around disturbed subplots in forest and nearby tundra habitats in four contrasting locations in the forest-tundra ecotone in northernmost Sweden and Norway. The study revealed that herbivores influenced the abundance but not the species composition of regenerating vegetation. Gaps were colonised by the dominant species in the surrounding vegetation. The only exception to this expectation was Empetrum nigrum, which failed to colonise gaps even though it dominated undisturbed vegetation. Significant effects of herbivory were only detected when both small and large herbivores were excluded. Herbivores decreased the abundance of three of the most common species Vaccinium myrtillus, Vaccinium vitis idaea, and Deschampsia flexuosa. The effect of herbivory on the abundance of these three species did not differ between habitats and locations. However, the composition of the regenerating vegetation differed between habitats and locations. The disturbance treatment increased the species richness on the scale of plots, habitats, and sites. However, on the scale of whole locations, all species found in disturbed areas were also found in undisturbed areas, suggesting that the natural disturbance regime in arctic landscapes is high enough to sustain colonising species.