Different stakeholder-based forest management scenarios facilitate balancing conservation and production in the bioeconomy

Land-use policies founded on the expertise and interests of key stakeholders are likely the most implementable and politically long-lasting, assuming stakeholders share a broader, similar perception of the future. We investigated whether there is a difference in how eleven indicator species of conservation concern may be affected given policy and forestry scenarios of four key forest stakeholders for a 100 000 ha Swedish landscape over the coming 100 years. We used colonization-extinction models and species distribution models. Most species had stable or increasing metapopulation sizes or occurrence probabilities after 100 years under all except the most production-oriented scenario by private landowners. For six wood-decaying fungi, forests protected or managed with continuous cover forestry (CCF) drove the positive developments. By contrast, these species essentially disappeared from stands with even-aged clearcutting forestry. Regarding the 14.5% strict protection applied by the state-owned forest company increased the area occupied by these species. Protecting an even larger area and application of CCF in the scenarios of the (non-)governmental conservation organizations increased fungal metapopulation sizes even more. Four bird species showed stable or positive developments in all scenarios. The same held true for the epiphytic lichen Lobaria pulmonaria, because the management applied projected increasing host tree numbers and densities. Thus, protecting up to 20% of the productive forest, applying more alternative management regimes and less even-aged clearcutting rotation forestry has the potential to greatly increase the (meta)population size and improve the red-list status of all the focal species, and presumably also of other species of conservation concern.