Technical Report 88
The European Forest Institute jointly with University of Molise has implemented a scoping study on the spatial distribution of forest ownership in Europe. Knowledge on this topic is of high relevance for the forestry sector but also related sectors and supplements other ongoing activities related to forest ownership. The main aim of the study is to contribute to a better knowledge of forest ownership distribution in the 47 European countries through a thorough data collection, analysis and visual presentation.
Public forests, but increasingly also forests in private ownership, play a key role in sustaining forest ecosystems, ensuring biodiversity protection, mitigating climate change, enhancing rural development and supplying timber and non-wood goods and services.
This study has laid out the following objectives: (1) to quantify the spatial distribution of forest ownership at the sub-national level (regional, counties, departments, districts, etc.), and (2) to collect information on the existence and the availability of georeferenced maps showing the spatial distribution of private and public forests in Europe countries. It presents a foundation for investigating in a following step on the technical implementation of a harmonized European forest ownership map in a GIS environment. The outputs including the extensive data set produced can serve for other potential research and information applications.
Private forest ownership map of Europe (pdf)
Public forest ownership map of Europe (pdf)
More information
Recommended citation:
Pamela Pulla, Andreas Schuck, Pieter Johannes Verkerk, Bruno Lasserre, Marco Marchetti and Tim Green. 2013. Mapping the distribution of forest ownership in Europe. EFI Technical Report 88. European Forest Institute.
Number of pages: 91
Download annexes in pdf-format
Annex 1: Forest Definitions
Annex 2: Country data fact sheet
Annex 3: Terms and definitions
Annex 4: Questionnaire introduction
Annex 5: Questionnaire
Annex 6: Countries having detailed forest ownership categories at national level
Annex 7: Forest ownership allocated to the three ownership categories used for this study: Private, public and other forest ownership from national data sources
Annex 8: National statistics and “SoEF 2011” comparison results for all countries
Annex 9: Ownership maps for all investigated countries (harmonized ownership classes forest map in ha and percent; country specific ownership division where available. Note that this is a zip-file containing 48 pdfs, so the total size is approx 53 MB!