Saving small areas when harvesting will not preserve all of the plants and animals that live in the forest. Some species require large areas to survive. We must plan the conservation values from a landscape perspective, and we do this by producing ecological landscape plans.
The FSC standard stipulates that at least 5% of the total forest holding must be excluded from forestry activities. A compilation of our ecological landscape plans shows that we fulfil this requirement.
We build nature conservation areas in our ecological landscape planning (ELP). These are areas that are larger than about one hectare, where we have decided to save, postpone harvesting, or manage the area with alternative cultivation methods.
We also try to link the saved forests in a network to create natural pathways for animals and plants, such as corridors that run alongside bogs and streams.
Re-creating forest environments
Because the forests have been managed for such a long time, some environments are now rare. We are trying to re-create the rare environments that are important for the survival of some plants and animals. These include woodland that has burnt, since forest fires are now rare and quickly extinguished, and hardwood forest.
Preparing an ecological landscape plan
An ecological landscape is planned in five steps:
- division into landscapes
- inventory of nature conservation value
- landscape analysis
- landscape plan
- regeneration of biotopes.
A living document
The ecological landscape plans are living documents that can be changed. When we discover new valuable areas, we add them to the landscape plans. Other areas will be removed if they lose their value for some reason, or are no longer considered sufficiently valuable.
The purpose of these changes is to ensure more functional nature conservation.