Forestry

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  (RP GGOV – P4-0059) 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 (Nagel et al., 2014; Svoboda in sod., 2015; Schurman in sod., 2018); indicators of forest naturalness (Bončina et al., 2017; Nagel et al., 2017; Kovač in Grošelj, 2018), structure of European forest owners  (Ficko in Bončina, 2013; Feliciano in sod., 2017; Ficko in sod., 2017), economic and environmental aspects of the exploitation of forest biomass  (Mihelič in sod., 2015, Leban in sod., 2016; Grilli in sod., 2017), forest management modelling (Simončič in sod., 2013; Debeljak in sod., 2015; Grošelj in sod., 2016), forest management policies (Sarkki in sod., 2017), conservation management of suburban forests (Pirnat in Hladnik, 2016) and work safety in forestry  (Poje in sod., 2016, Marenče in sod., 2017). 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 (Chapron in sod., 2014), the impact of top predators on the distribution of mesopredators  (Newsome in sod., 2017) and forest disturbances under climate change (Seidl in sod., 2017).