Project: Life Long Learning Forestry Extended
We want to build an educational platform with partners to provide for academic forest management courses for forest owners and professionals for mutual exchange in participating countries.
Project information
Project manager
Rikard Jakobsson
Other project members
Erika Olofsson, Per-Olof Johansson, Brian Kottonya, Dagnija Lazdina, Andis Lazdins, Edgars Dubrovskis, Signe Neimane, Sigita Alksne, Arnus Muiznieks, Ahto Kangur, Jaanus Aun
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University, Latvian State Forest Research Institute (SILAVA), Latvian University of Life Sciences and Technology, Latvian Forest Owner Association, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Estonian Private Forest Owner Association
Financier
Swedish Institute (SI)
Timetable
Sep 2023-May 2025
Subject
Forestry and Wood Technology (Department of Forestry and Wood Technology, Faculty of technology)
Research group
Small-scale Forestry and Forest economics
More about the project
A large extent of the forests (in EU 60%) are owned and managed by private forest owners and situated in the countryside. Forest owners are crucial for supporting and implementing sustainable forest management, EU policies and enabling a development in the countryside.
Career opportunities are grimmer in the countryside, forestry is one of few sectors where these exist. As a forest owner you decide on how to manage the forest and are responsible for all actions taken on your land including cultural heritage, habitats, game population, recreational values, and taxation.
Despite the complex issues of social, ecological and economic matters, academic education for forest owners has been absent. In contrast, the State in most countries has academic curricula, for the needs of the State. In Sweden a forest owner education has been available since 2001 and was in 2022 set up as a trial in Latvia. It generated positive input from forest owners and organisations and a continuation and development was proposed by partners.
Building on the concept developed with our Latvian partner organisations we want to extend the existing partnership to Estonia with observers from Ukraine and develop academic forest management courses for forest owners and professionals. With a possibility to increase academic qualifications, competence levels and productivity can increase in terms of human, economic, biodiversity and cultural values.
There is also know-how in the Baltic countries concerning the tending of broad-leaved forests where small- and medium sized machinery is used throughout the value chain. This is of interest to many large and small forest owners in Sweden, where tending is focused on pine and spruce with large machinery, but conditions similar to the Baltic countries.
- The project is a further development of the project:
Life-long learning in Forestry, Latvia, which ran in 2022-2023. - The project is part of the research in these research groups:
Small-scale Forestry and Forest economics