Sustainable forestry in southern Sweden

Last changed: 28 March 2023

This master’s course focuses on forest management and forest ecology in managed stands. During this nine-week course, we investigate how sustainable development is, or can be, implemented in today’s forestry practice. The course gives you the tools to switch from traditional instrumental-guideline approaches to more flexible objective-driven management to respond to emerging needs and challenges in forestry. We cover plantation forestry as it is widely practiced today, and emerging forest management approaches like continuous cover, mixed-species stands and retention tree practices.

Two weeks are spent outdoors, visiting forests and experimental stands in Halland and Småland. We travel together, with transport and accommodation organized and paid for by the course. One day of the trip is with Sveaskog employees visiting their ecoparks, and another day is spent in Norra Kvill National Park. Dates for upcoming excursions can be found at the course webpage.

The course includes an introduction to data management and analysis in the R programming language. We also cover the fundamentals of growth and yield calculation. The literature list will be posted on the course webpage in early June. The course learning platform is Canvas and most of the literature, assignments and schedule will be available to you as soon as you register. For students eager to start reading and preparing in advance we recommend:

West, P. W. Growing Plantation Forests. 2nd ed. 2014. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014. 978-3-319-01827-0
Link to online reading if you have SLU access.

Crawley, Michael J. Statistics : an Introduction Using R . Second edition. Chichester, West Sussex, [England: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
Link to online reading if you have SLU access.

A personal favourite introduction to the intersection of silviculture and ecology, although not course literature: Puettmann, Klaus J., Coates, K. Dave., and Messier, Christian C. A Critique of Silviculture Managing for Complexity . Washington, D.C: Island Press, 2009.
Link to online if you have SLU access.

If instead you prefer a more animated introduction to Swedish forestry and the current discussions regarding its management, check this out.

Course teachers are researchers in silviculture and ecology from the department: Emma Holmström, Urban Nilsson, Lisa Petersson, Jorge Aldea, Martin Goude, Ulf Johansson and others. We also anticipate the active participation of several PhD students from our research groups, both as lecturers and teaching assistants.

We look forward to seeing you in September!

Emma Holmström