Forest ownership is changing across Europe. In some areas a growing number of so-called “new” forest owners hold only small parcels, have no agricultural or forestry knowledge and no capacities or interest to manage their forests, while in others new community and private owners are bringing fresh interest and new objectives to woodland management. This diversity and change creates implementation problems for forest-related policies including biodiversity conservation, timber and renewable energy supply, climate change mitigation, or recreation.

This Action aims to provide European scale insights into differentiated and changing forest ownership patterns, to scrutinize their consequences and to explore new approaches for policy and forest management. Main objectives are:

1. To analyse attitudes and constraints of different forest owner types and the ongoing changes.
2. To explore innovative management approaches for new forest owner types.
3. To study effective policy instruments with a comparative analysis approach.
4. To draw conclusions and recommendations for forest-related policies, forest management practice, further education and future research.

The interdisciplinary work will be done in close cooperation with relevant public and private stakeholders. A Cost Action is suited for the strongly needed but still lacking comprehensive European overview and analyses.