Landscape dynamics of family forest owners
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.04.018
Abstract
This special issue of Landscape & Urban Planning (LAND) “Landscape dynamics of family forest owners” represents a collection of approaches to describe and understand how family forest owners around the world, in the aggregate, influence and are influenced by landscape-scale land use dynamics. Also known as smallholders, small-scale owners, communal owners, or nonindustrial private forest owners (although these terms are not strictly interchangeable; Harrison et al., 2002, Fischer et al., 2010), family forest owners are the primary land managers for forest holdings which vary in size from a few acres to hectares. In both industrial and developing countries, the decisions these landowners make are influenced by both local and large-scale economic, environmental, and social processes, such as market price fluctuations, climate change, invasive pest spread, ownership parcelization, and changes in land tenure laws. And conversely, these individual-level land use decisions impact forest patterns at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, from village to continent.