Socioecological landscape planning approach and multicriteria acceptability analysis in multiple-purpose forest management

In the socioecological landscape planning of natural resource management, sociocultural and ecological decision criteria are integrated with ‘traditional’ economic considerations in an analytic and systemic way. As the main phases, the approach involves (1) pinpointing the sites of foremost importance from the viewpoint of ecological and sociocultural management objectives; (2) elaborating different so-called ecological and sociocultural networks, the combinations of which determine alternative socioecological networks; (3) producing alternative timber production programmes for areas not included in different socioecological networks (resulting in different alternative management plans for the whole area under planning); (4) evaluating the relative worth of alternative plans with respect to each relevant objective; and, finally, (5) the holistic comparison of alternative management plans by applying multiple criteria decision aid methods. This article first discusses the principles and rationale of the approach. Then an illustrative application of the new planning approach is presented. In the application, recreational and ecological objectives were integrated into forest management planning of a landscape owned by the State. The criteria were measured on ordinal scale, and they were ranked according to their mutual importance. Stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis with ordinal criteria (SMAA-O) was used in the holistic comparison of alternative landscape-level plans. The socioecological landscape planning approach was found practicable. The Finnish Forest and Park Service, governing the vast majority of State-owned lands in Finland, has already made the decision to apply the approach in strategic natural resource management.