Research Programmes

Forests are the dominant landscape feature in Slovenia, a key renewable natural resource, and the basis for a high quality of life due to the provisioning of ecosystem services. Forest production and processing provide important jobs, especially in less populated border areas. The key challenge for future development is to balance forest exploitation with conservation of ecological functions in a changing environment (pollution, climate and land use change).

The research program Forest, Forestry and Renewable Forest Resources  (External link to RP GGOV – P4-0059 Open in new window) is focused on long-term basic research that addresses the functioning of forest ecosystems and solutions to contemporary problems of forestry. The research program is centred at the Department of Forestry, BF and brings together both basic and applied researchers and practitioners, currently including 30 staff members with a doctorate, 5 graduate students, and 5 technicians. In addition to the interdisciplinarity, a key advantage of the program is our focus on close-to-nature management, which enables environmentally friendly wood production while ensuring the maintenance of all other forest functions. We are pursuing three groups of objectives: a) long-term research of forest ecosystems and development of close-to-nature forest management, b) adaptation of multipurpose forest management to a changing environment, and c) development of criteria for ensuring sustainable management with increased use of forests and the introduction of new technologies. The program contributes to improvement of forest management in Slovenia and achievement of the goals set in national strategy documents and international agreements.

Researchers regularly publish in domestic and high ranking international scientific journals. Important publications from recent years have been achieved in the fields of: natural forests and natural disturbances (External link to Nagel et al., 2014 Open in new window; External link to Svoboda in sod., 2015 Open in new window; External link to Schurman in sod., 2018 Open in new window); indicators of forest naturalness (External link to Bončina et al., 2017 Open in new window; External link to Nagel et al., 2017 Open in new window; External link to Kovač in Grošelj, 2018 Open in new window), structure of European forest owners  (External link to Ficko in Bončina, 2013 Open in new window; External link to Feliciano in sod., 2017 Open in new window; External link to Ficko in sod., 2017 Open in new window), economic and environmental aspects of the exploitation of forest biomass  (External link to Mihelič in sod., 2015 Open in new window, External link to Leban in sod., 2016 Open in new window; External link to Grilli in sod., 2017 Open in new window), forest management modelling (External link to Simončič in sod., 2013 Open in new window; External link to Debeljak in sod., 2015 Open in new window; External link to Grošelj in sod., 2016 Open in new window), forest management policies (External link to Sarkki in sod., 2017 Open in new window), conservation management of suburban forests (External link to Pirnat in Hladnik, 2016 Open in new window) and work safety in forestry  (External link to Poje in sod., 2016 Open in new window, External link to Marenče in sod., 2017 Open in new window). Over the past three years, three notable articles have been published in Science, Nature Communications and Nature Climate journals, tackling issues on recovery of large carnivores in European landscapes (External link to Chapron in sod., 2014 Open in new window), the impact of top predators on the distribution of mesopredators  (External link to Newsome in sod., 2017 Open in new window) and forest disturbances under climate change (External link to Seidl in sod., 2017 Open in new window).