SPATIAL PATTERNS OF HABITAT PROTECTION IN AREAS WITH NONINDUSTRIAL PRIVATE FORESTRY - HYPOTHESES AND IMPLICATIONS

Selection of certain habitat types on landscape, regional or national scales in order to conserve or create desirable ecological structures and/or compositions are often part of nature conservation strategies. In state-owned and industry-owned forests, selection of habitats for n ature conservation purposes has been a question of maximizing ecologic al benefits. In non-industrial private forestry (MPF), the choice of h abitat type affects to what area fraction habitats occur on a forest e state. As this can vary considerably between forest estates, decision makers should consider this variation (the variation in habitat occurr ence) when selecting habitat type for habitat protection programs. In this paper, a hypothesis based on the abundance, the average size, and average shape of habitats was developed to explain distribution of ha bitat occurrence. Monte Carlo simulations and empirical studies of 11, 700 ha and 194 forest estates showed that variation in habitat occurre nce can be analyzed with information of abundance, size and shape of a specific habitat type. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.