Cost-efficient Conservation Strategies for Boreal Forest Biodiversity

Perhans, K. 2008. Cost-efficient conservation strategies for boreal forest biodiversity. Doctor’s dissertation. ISSN 1652-6880, ISBN 978-91-85913-72-5 Long and intensive forest management has made conservation measures in the forest landscape necessary to maintain forest biodiversity. The most common measure is to set aside land for conservation purposes. This, however, requires large financial resources and available budgets are generally insufficient. In this thesis, a set of key factors affecting the cost-efficiency when selecting conservation areas were investigated. I studied (1) the conservation quality and economic land value of three common types of conservation areas: nature reserves, woodland key habitats, and retention patches on harvested areas; (2) the capacity of retention patches to harbour bryophytes and lichens over time; and (3) factors determining what information should be used when selecting conservation areas, including the conservation goal, correlation and variability of different types of data, and the costs for collecting information. Two large field studies formed the basis for the studies, where data on bryophytes, lichens and structural characteristics were collected, and economic land values were calculated. Site-selection analyses were used in combination with other analytical tools to investigate and compare efficiency of different conservation strategies. The results showed that woodland key habitats had a very high conservation quality, and were generally also the most cost-efficient type of conservation area for the measures of biodiversity used in the studies. Different types of retention patches complemented each other in terms of species composition and the variation in conservation quality and economic value was large among patches. Many bryophytes decreased in retention patches following harvesting, while some lichens decreased and others increased. The costs for obtaining information on conservation quality of areas were generally low compared to the economic land values. The studies indicate that a conservation strategy based on many types of conservation areas is most likely efficient for long-term conservation of forest biodiversity. To increase cost-efficiency, systematic selection of areas within each conservation area type should be carried out, where both conservation quality and economic values of areas are taken into account.