Readiness of forest officers for adaptations in forest management planning

Abstract

Under the framework of a society that enhances the demand for different kinds of ecosystem services, "Forest Management Planning" (FMP) has changed notably over the last decades. As a consequence of budget constraints and the fact that the present forest planning system of the State Forest Administration of Baden-Württemberg has been in operation since 2000, this system has to be developed further. Since the group of forest officers at the county level is the largest user group, it was decided to start a participatory process in order to derive the most relevant requirements of that group. A survey within the board of managing directors followed. In order to gain an insight into the requirements and preferences we used the pairwise comparison method. The paper highlights the preference structure in respect to (1) the goals of FMP, (2) target groups, (3) the FMP process, (4) tasks, (5) and the outputs of FMP. It can be shown that the average percipience of FMP of forest officers tends to be more traditional and internal than proactive and stakeholder-oriented. The pairwise comparison approach has been proven successful as a means to get insight in the preference structures.