In our forest economics and policy research, we examine the impact of economic and social services on the forest and vice versa. Forests provide society with a wide range of services, including the preservation of biodiversity, protection against natural hazards and climate change, and the provision of space for leisure and recreation purposes.
In our research, we measure and evaluate these services using various methods. We are interested, by way of example, in the scale of these services, the strategies and measures that could be used to develop these services in the future, and the costs involved.
In collaboration with EFICENT (Freiburg im Breisgau), we looked into how nature conservation can be incorporated into commercial forests. This involved comparing political measures between countries examining how microhabitats could be factored into thinning decisions at field sites (marteloscopes*) in the forest.
*A marteloscope is a training aid for foresters and forest rangers. It is a precisely defined plot of land within which each tree is numbered, and where the diameter, species, economic and sometimes even ecological values of the tree are also known.