Per Angelstam

Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences · Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management

Context Abandonment of cultural landscape practices has had a notable impact on grasslands and domestic livestock that depend on them. This affects the prerequisites for sustainable transitions of cultural landscapes, which combine traditional livelihoods and novel ones like tourism. Objectives The aims of this study were to explore (1) the long-t...

To conserve biodiversity, it is imperative to maintain and restore sufficient amounts of functional habitat networks. Therefore, the location of the remaining forests with natural structures and processes over landscapes and large regions is a key objective. Here we integrated machine learning (Random Forest) and open landscape data to scan all for...

While traditional forest management systems aim at maximizing timber production, sustainable forest management focuses on the multiple benefits of entire forest landscapes. The latter is now at the top of policy agendas. This calls for learning through evaluation to support the implementation of policies aiming towards multi-functional forest lands...

The Białowieża Forest is a contested transboundary forest massif in Poland and Belarus. Reflecting on transitions from value chains built on sustained yield forestry to ecotourism, we pioneer documentation of how country-specific legacies shape preferences toward increased forest protection at the expense of wood production. For both countries, we...

Swedish policies aim at conserving biological production, biodiversity, cultural heritage and recreational assets. This requires compositionally and structurally functional networks of representative habitats, the processes that maintain them, and resilient ecosystems. The term green infrastructure (GI) captures this. We review (1) policy concernin...

Rural landscapes face multiple challenges, but they can be attractive for developing nature-based tourism. Encouraging place-based participatory governance in local communities represents a relevant transdisciplinary landscape approach. In this study, we map (1) rural and touristic challenges and (2) coping strategies in peripheral–rural municipali...

This chapter is based on our review paper by Albulescu et al. (2022). Here we summarize 1) the complex development of forest ownership and management in Romania, following WWI and WWII, then through the early days of the democratic transition, until the present time (2022), 2) the hand-me-downs from the communist era and the ways in which forest go...

Anthropogenic landscape transformations have promoted the provision of ecosystem services (ES) at the expense of other ES, biodiversity, and human well-being. We analysed the transformation portfolios of ES provisions, the costs of transformation, and the rivalry between ES categories and biodiversity conservation during the pre-communist and commu...

We assess what drives the lower valuation of nature protection on the other side of the border in two European transboundary nature areas, the Białowieża Forest (Poland and Belarus), and Fulufjället (Norway and Sweden). Applying hybrid choice modelling, we account for people's attitudes when eliciting their preferences for extensions of transbounda...

Contact to nature and greenspace is important for emotional well-being and can promote human health. Forest landscapes provide such access to greenspace, especially in protected areas. However, forested protected areas are impacted by natural disturbances such as bark beetle infestations. On the one hand, such disturbances have positive impacts on...

Physical and chemical quality indicators of 65 polyfloral honey samples from three administrative districts of Chernivtsi region in South Western Ukraine were studied. The chosen administrative districts were Putyla (representing the ‘Traditional villages’ stratum), Storozhynets (the ‘Intermediate’ stratum) and Khotyn (the ‘Intensive agriculture’ s...

The term green infrastructure captures the need to conserve biodiversity and to sustain landscapes’ different ecosystem services. Maintaining green infrastructures through protected areas, management and landscape restoration requires knowledge in geography, spatial data about biophysical, anthropogenic and immaterial values, spatial comprehensive...

Forest ecosystems are a prime example of the heated debates that have arisen around how forests should be managed, and what services and benefits they should deliver. The European transitions in governance to and from communist regimes have had significant impacts on forests and their management. Unstable legislative and institutional changes prior...

In Europe, forest management has controlled forest dynamics to sustain commodity production over multiple centuries. Yet over‐regulation for growth and yield diminishes resilience to environmental stress as well as threatens biodiversity, leading to increasing forest susceptibility to an array of disturbances. These trends have stimulated interest...

Aim of the report - This report aims to explore the importance of biodiversity in the context of European forests and to make suggestions on how this biodiversity can be effectively maintained and enhanced through protection, management and restoration. The term Europe in this document means European Union, except where mentioned otherwise. The rep...

What is Closer to Nature Forest Management? Closer-to-Nature Forest Management is a new concept proposed in the EU Forest Strategy for 2030, which aims to improve the conservation values and climate resilience of multifunctional, managed forests in Europe. Building on the latest scientific evidence, this report attempts to define the concept based...

This study aims at supporting the maintenance of representative functional habitat networks as green infrastructure for biodiversity conservation through transdisciplinary macroecological analyses of wet grassland landscapes and their stewardship systems. We chose ten north European wet grassland case study landscapes from Iceland and the Netherlan...

Fire is an important natural disturbance and a driver of hemi-boreal forest successional trajectories, structural complexity, and biodiversity. Understanding the historic fire regime is an important step towards sustainable forest management. Focusing on Lithuania’s hemi-boreal forests, we first mapped the potential natural fire regimes based on th...

Expectations of what forests and woodlands should provide vary among locations, stakeholder groups, and over time. Developing multifunctional forests requires understanding of the dynamic roles of traditions and cultural legacies in social-ecological systems at multiple levels and scales. Implementing policies about multifunctional forests requires...

Context Evidence-based knowledge is crucial for place-based knowledge production and learning towards sustainable landscapes through stewardship and integrated spatial planning. Objectives We focus on the landscape service concept as a tool, and three fundamental challenges for its use: (1) how to monitor benefits provided by different landscapes;...

Exploitation of natural forests forms expanding frontiers. Simultaneously, protected area frontiers aim at maintaining functional habitat networks. To assess net effects of these frontiers, we examined 16 case study areas on five continents. We (1) mapped protected area instruments, (2) assessed their effectiveness, (3) mapped policy implementation...

Wet grassland degradation is a global issue that involves both altered land cover patterns and ecological processes, which affect the distribution and abundance of species. The sharp decline in European wader bird (Charadrii) populations is a good example. The aim of this study is to test the hypothesis that the anthropogenic developmental stage of...

Due to the multiplicity of challenges facing all societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, agricultural systems and rural landscapes are under pressure. Solutions for their optimization towards sustainability at high productivity are required. We address the majority of current agricultural systems and discuss approaches for assessing...

Agricultural landscapes (rural landscapes, agrolandscapes) are territories shaped by agricultural production. They have enabled the development of human civilizations and are a cultural achievement. Peasants, farmers and agricultural enterprises feed society. They have created agricultural landscapes for their business and habitats for their life....

There is a rivalry between policies on intensification of forest management to meet the demands of a growing bioeconomy, and policies on green infrastructure functionality. Evaluation of the net effects of different policy instruments on real-world outcomes is crucial. First, we present data on final felling rates in wood production landscapes and...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01222-w

Global forest area is declining rapidly, along with degradation of the ecological condition of remaining forests. Hence it is necessary to adopt forest management approaches that can achieve a balance between (1) human management designs based on homogenization of forest structure to efficiently deliver economic values and (2) naturally emerging se...

Context Honey bees provide multiple ecosystem services. Comparisons of coupled social-ecological systems (SES) can improve the understanding of the factors affecting honey bees and beekeeping. Objectives Stressing the need for SES analyses, we explore beekeepers’ perceived factors affecting bees and beekeeping, test the hypothesis that honey bee c...

Peatlands are the "kidneys" of river basins. However, intensification of agriculture and forestry in Europe has resulted in the degradation of peatlands and their biodiversity (i.e., species, habitats and processes in ecosystems), thus impairing water retention, nutrient filtration, and carbon capture. Restoration of peatlands requires assessment o...

Achieving sustainable development as an inclusive societal process in rural landscapes, and sustainability in terms of functional green infrastructures for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, are wicked challenges. Competing claims from various sectors call for evidence-based adaptive collaborative governance. Leveraging such approach...

Context Maintaining functional green infrastructures (GIs) require evidence-based knowledge about historic and current states and trends of representative land cover types. Objectives We address: (1) the long-term loss and transformation of potential natural forest vegetation; (2) the effects of site productivity on permanent forest loss and emerg...

Loss of forest naturalness challenges the maintenance of green infrastructure (GI) for biodiversity conservation and delivery of diverse ecosystem services. Using the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi target #11 with its quantitative and qualitative criteria as a normative model, we aim at supporting landscape planning through a pioneering...

While transdisciplinary (TD) research is desired in order to solve real world sustainability issues, this may be challenging for both academic and non-academic participants. Supporting learning through evaluation, we analyzed a project aiming at sustainable transport infrastructures. After developing a TD research framework as a benchmark, two exte...

The tension between biodiversity conservation and multipurpose forest management may lead to conflicts. An internationally prominent example is the Białowieża Forest Massif (BFM), an extensive forest complex with high levels of naturalness. We apply a systematic, multidisciplinary assessment process to review empirical evidence on different dimensi...

Regional clear-felling of naturally dynamic boreal forests has left remote forest landscapes in northern Europe with challenges regarding rural development based on wood mining. However, biodiversity conservation with higher levels of ambition than what is possible in regions with a long forest history, and cultural heritage, offer opportunities fo...

Disturbance regimes are changing in forests across the world in response to global climate change. Despite the profound impacts of disturbances on ecosystem services and biodiversity, assessments of disturbances at the global scale remain scarce. Here, we analyzed natural disturbances in boreal and temperate forest ecosystems for the period 2001–20...

Disturbance regimes are changing in forests across the world in response to global climate change. Despite the profound impacts of disturbances on ecosystem services and biodiversity, assessments of disturbances at the global scale remain scarce. Here, we analyzed natural disturbances in boreal and temperate forest ecosystems for the period 2001–20...

In the original published article, the sentence "Nevertheless, semi-natural forest remnants continue to be harvested and fragmented (Svensson et al. 2018; Jonsson et al. 2019), and over 2000 forest-associated species (of 15 000 assessed) are listed as threatened on Sweden's red-list, largely represented by macro-fungi, beetles, lichens and butterfl...

Distributed environmental research infrastructures are important to support assessments of the effects of global change on landscapes, ecosystems and society. These infrastructures need to provide continuity to address long-term change, yet be flexible enough to respond to rapid societal and technological developments that modify research prioritie...

Sustainable development as a societal process aimed at securing sustainability is challenging. To encourage the necessary knowledge production and learning in different social-ecological contexts requires a place-based networking research infrastructure that involves multiple academic disciplines and non-academic actors. Long-term socio-ecological...

Centralized management of large carnivore populations in rural and remote landscapes used by local people often leads to conflicts between the objectives of wildlife conservation and rural development. We tested the hypothesis that the presence of wolves indirectly reduces landowner revenues from traditional small game hunting, and that landowner r...

The multi-scale approach to conserving forest biodiversity has been used in Sweden since the 1980s, a period defined by increased reserve area and conservation actions within production forests. However, two thousand forest-associated species remain on Sweden’s red-list, and Sweden’s 2020 goals for sustainable forests are not being met. We argue th...

The ecosystem services framework aims to encourage ecological sustainability through political economic decisions. However, it fails to capture the complexity of social-ecological interactions. This is an obstacle for coping with current grand challenges through integrative knowledge production and collaborative learning. Landscape concepts and app...

Research Highlights: The European Union’s last large intact forest landscapes along the Scandinavian Mountain range in Sweden offer unique opportunities for conservation of biodiversity, ecological integrity and resilience. However, these forests are at a crossroad between intensified wood production aimed at bio-economy, and rural development base...

Context Place-based transdisciplinary research involves multiple academic disciplines and non-academic actors. Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platform is one concept with ~ 80 initiatives globally. Objectives As an exercise in learning through evaluation we audited (1) the siting, construction and maintenance of individual LTSER platf...

Context The governance of international natural World Heritage sites is extremely challenging. In the search for effective multilevel governance there is a need to identify the community of people which have place attachment to the areas, i.e. ‘the community of fans’ at local to international levels. Objectives Focusing on the landscape of the int...

Context Achieving sustainable development as an inclusive societal process, and securing sustainability and resilience of human societies as well as the natural environment are wicked problems. Realising sustainable forest management (SFM) policy in local landscapes is one example. Objectives Using the European Union as a case study for the implem...

The Best Practices Manual for Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platforms is the product of a four-year audit of existing European LTSER Platforms within the framework of the Horizon 2020 (INFRAIA 2014-2015) sponsored research infrastructure project “Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem & Socio-Ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER...

Semi-open oak woods and solitary oaks commonly dominate the wooded fabric (i.e. the ‘oakscape’) of European traditional rural agricultural landscapes based on animal husbandry. However, modern land use systems fail to perpetuate oakscapes, posing a serious threat to biodiversity conservation and the associated diversity of ecosystem services. Recon...

Land use and landcover change alter the ability of habitat networks to maintain viable species populations. While their effects on the quality, amount and patterns of landcover patches are commonly studied, how they affect ecological processes, such as predation on focal species remains neglected. This macroecological study tests the hypothesis tha...

Implementing sustainable forest management (SFM) policy on the ground is not straightforward, and depends on the social-ecological context. To meet the need for place-based stakeholder collaboration towards regionally adapted knowledge production and learning in support of SFM an integrated landscape approach can assist. Hosting most of the circumb...

To support human well-being, green (or ecological) infrastructure policy stresses the need to sustain functional networks of representative terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems for the sus-tainable provision of multiple ecosystem services. Implementing this means that the com-plexity of interactions between social and ecological systems at multiple s...

Abandonment of traditional farming practices, such as hay-making and pasturing, has resulted in rapid loss of open wet grassland habitats in Europe. The globally threatened Aquatic Warbler (Acrocephalus paludicola L.) is a bird species that occurs almost exclusively in open fen mires, which have virtually disappeared in Western Europe, but still pe...

Landscapes are maintained and changed through combinations of actions and decisions which in turn are based on what Hägerstrand has termed territorial competences. Today these competences are primarily linked to individual landowners and users; in modern rural landscapes these are first of all the farmers. Farmers’ landscape practices are to a larg...

Using an economic valuation approach, we assessed people's stated preferences for policy aimed at enhancing restoration of functional networks of naturally dynamic boreal forest habitats as a public good. Active landscape restoration can improve the functionality of boreal forest habitats as green infrastructure, which is essential for biodiversity...