The paper examines the needs, premises and criteria for effective public participation in tactical forest planning. A method for participatory forest planning utilizing the techniques of preference analysis, professional expertise and heuristic optimization is introduced. The techniques do not cover the whole process of participatory planning, but are applied as a tool constituting the numerical core for decision support. The complexity of multi-resource management is addressed by hierarchical decision analysis which assesses the public values, preferences and decision criteria toward the planning situation. An optimal management plan is sought using heuristic optimization. The plan can further be improved through mutual negotiations, if necessary. The use of the approach is demonstrated with an illustrative example, it's merits and challenges for participatory forest planning and decision making are discussed and a model for applying it in general forest planning context is depicted. By using the approach, valuable information can be obtained about public preferences and the effects of taking them into consideration on the choice of the combination of standwise treatment proposals for a forest area. Participatory forest planning calculations, carried out by the approach presented in the paper, can be utilized in conflict management and in developing compromises between competing interests.

To ensure future sustainability, cities need to consider concepts of livability and resident wellbeing alongside environmental, economic and infrastructure development equity. The current rapid urbanization experienced in many regions is leading to sustainability challenges, but also offers the opportunity to deliver infrastructure supporting the social aspects of cities and the services that underpin them alongside economic growth. Unfortunately, evidence of what is needed to deliver urban wellbeing is largely absent from the global south. This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap through a novel interdisciplinary mixed methods study undertaken in two rapidly changing cities (one Thai and one Kenyan) using qualitative surveys, subjective wellbeing and stress measurements, and spatial analysis of urban infrastructure distribution. We find the absence of basic infrastructure (including waste removal, water availability and quality) unsurprisingly causes significant stress for city residents. However, once these services are in place, smaller variations (inequalities) in social (crime, tenure) and environmental (noise, air quality) conditions begin to play a greater role in determining differences in subjective wellbeing across a city. Our results indicate that spending time in urban greenspaces can mitigate the stressful impacts of city living even for residents of informal neighborhoods. Our data also highlights the importance of places that enable social interactions supporting wellbeing-whether green or built. These results demonstrate the need for diversity and equity in the provision of public realm spaces to ensure social and spatial justice. These findings strengthen the need to promote long term livability in LMIC urban planning alongside economic growth, environmental sustainability, and resilience.

Three most promising protection methods of pine pulp wood stacks against the attacks of Tomicus piniperda were compared. The methods were the covering of stacks by fibreglass-strengthened paper or twofold achrylene netting, removing the upper parts of stacks, and enhanced planning of the placement of the timber store using ARC/INFO GIS-software. T. piniperda was observed to strongly prefer the upper parts of the stacks: 90% of the beetles occurred within 0.5 meters of the top of the stacks. Covering of the stacks decreased the attack density of T. piniperda, and the protection effect of covering was 80%. Due to long transport distances and fragmentation of forest landscape the relocation of timber store was found to be an unsuitable method in the practical level. Also, taking into account the costs of the method, removing of the upper parts of stacks was considered to be the optimal solution.

The use of indicator species in forest conservation and management planning can facilitate enhanced preservation of biodiversity from the negative effects of forestry and other uses of land. However, this requires detailed and spatially comprehensive knowledge of the habitat preferences and distributions of selected focal indicator species. Unfortunately, due to limited resources for field surveys, only a small proportion of the occurrences of focal species is usually known. This shortcoming can be circumvented by using modeling techniques to predict the spatial distribution of suitable sites for the target species. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) and other remote sensing (RS) techniques have the potential to provide useful environmental data covering systematically large areas for these purposes. Here, we focused on six bird of prey and woodpecker species known to be good indicators of boreal forest biodiversity values. We used known nest sites of the six indicator species based on nestling ringing records. Thus, the most suitable nesting sites of these species provide important information for biodiversity-friendly forest management and conservation planning. We developed fine-grained, that is, 96 × 96 m grid cell resolution, predictive maps across the whole of Finland of the suitable nesting habitats based on ALS and other RS data and spatial information on the distribution of important forest stands for the six studied biodiversity indicator bird species based on nesting-habitat suitability modeling, that is, the MaxEnt model. Habitat preferences of the study species, as determined by MaxEnt, were in line with the previous knowledge of species-habitat relations. The proportion of suitable habitats of these species in protected areas (PAs) was considerable, but our analysis also revealed many potentially high-quality forest stands outside PAs. However, many of these sites are increasingly threatened by logging because of increased pressures for using forests for bioeconomy and forest industry based on National Forest Strategy. Predicting habitat suitability based on information on the nest sites of indicator species provides a new tool for systematic conservation planning over large areas in boreal forests in Europe, and a corresponding approach would also be feasible and recommendable elsewhere where similar data are available.

This paper deals with the testing of dynamic stratification for estimating stand level forest characteristics (basal area, mean diameter, mean height and mean age) for a 117 ha study area in Finland. The results do not show possibilities to achieve more accurate estimates using only Landsat TM principal components as auxiliary data opposed to static stratification. It was found that in dynamic stratification non-measured observations should be assigned the mean characteristics of the measured observations that belong to the same cube (class) instead of randomly selected ones. Stratification errors tend to decrease with the lessening of stratification variable classes until a certain limit. If only one principal component is used the number of classes has however little influence. Low field values are overestimated and high values underestimated. The only successful results were obtained using two variables of different origin – the qualitative development stage class and the quantitative 1st principal compund. The lowest root mean square error in estimating basal area was 6.40 m2/ha, mean diameter 3.34 cm, mean height 2.65 m and mean age 14.06 years. This increase of stratification accuracy is mainly resulted by the use of development stage class as an auxiliary variable.

Two Pinus sylvestris stands in each of four research areas in different parts of Finland were pruned during the period May 1985-April 1986. Test prunings were carried out 16 times in all eight stands during the year. Every other pruned tree was inoculated with conidia of the canker fungus Phacidium coniferarum. Pruning damage surveys were also carried in 50 pine stands pruned during 1981-84. The most susceptible pruning period was from October to December. The safe pruning season ended in autumn when the five-day mean temperature decreased below 7 degrees C. The unsafe pruning season ended when the temperature remained permanently below 0 degrees C. The mycelia of the fungus were pathogenic in the inoculations made from October to March. The fungus commonly occurred in slash and in pines wounded during the autumn. P. coniferarum has a one-year life cycle. Recommendations are made for avoiding unsafe pruning times in the different regions of Finland.

Ethnic minority villages across Southwest China have recently experienced a dramatic increase in cultural heritage projects. Following new policies of rural development and the growth of tourism, villages are being converted into heritage sites to preserve the aesthetics of rurality and ethnicity. This article describes how architect scholars plan to create a ‘Chinese Traditional Village’ in a Dong autonomous district of Guizhou province, focusing in particular on the constraints of those plans and the negotiations. Rather than looking at plans as the end product, this article sheds light on the social dynamics of planning to reconsider the capacity for compromise between the interests and perspectives of planners, officials, and local inhabitants. Lasting compromises appear specifically in the materiality of buildings, pathways, and public space.

The formation of urban structure is a complicated process and its outcome, that cannot be easily forecast, is not necessarily optimal. This creates a need to understand the process and gives a reason to control it by urban planning. As the circumstances are in constant change, the plans have to anticipate the time to come – partly far into the future. Research is needed to support planning to understand the factors that affect the urban structure better. Accessibility, that seems to be one of the key factors in the processes of land use change, seems to provide a suitable tool for planning and research: when suitably defined, it can connect the properties of transport and land use systems as well as the economic, social and environmental goals. The availability of services is closely connected to the quality of living environment, so studying the accessibility of them can produce new notable information for the needs of urban planning. The aim of this study was to explain how changes in urban structure cause changes in the accessibility of services by walking, mass transit and car in the long term, and study how these changes could affect the use of the services both from the perspectives of the users' possibilities and the potential the services produce. The public library network in Helsinki region was studied as an example. Studying the accessibility of public libraries is useful as such, as they provide many types of positive impacts, but public libraries are also a convenient example in studying the accessibility of services as they are a service actively used in everyday life and information about the use is available. Distances in the accessibility measures were measured as travel time. Accessibility was measured both in travel times to the nearest library and in potentials of making a library trip calculated by library trip forecasting models based on the real behaviour of their users. Comparison was made between the years 2014 and 2050, during which the population and the transport system are expected to change as in the created scenarios, which are based on the new Helsinki City Plan. In addition, the possible effects to the accessibility of the public libraries by possible cost cuts in the service network were inspected by simulating the effects of the cuts. Based on the results the public libraries in the study area seem to be relatively well accessible by all the inspected transport modes. The changes in the transport systems seem to have minor effects on the accessibility when measured in travel time to the nearest library, but when the effects are measured in the potentials of making a library trip, they seem to be a bit more significant – by mass transit, accessibility would improve and by car, it would deteriorate. The forecast change in the population would increase the number of people accessing the nearest library in half an hour, but the proportion of this group to the total population in the area would be smaller than before. The attraction of libraries affect to the potentials they produce, but the impacts are concentrated on the surrounding areas of the libraries and on the traffic routes, where the accessibility is relatively good to begin with. Even though excluding some of the smallest libraries from the service network would have relatively small effects on the accessibility in the aggregate, the effects on individual level and for sustainable accessibility could be significant. Based on the study results more significant than the changes in the transport system or in the attraction of the services seem to be how near population and services are located each other: the prerequisites for multimodal accessibility cannot necessarily be guaranteed if the distances are long. Based on the study results, to prevent the deterioration of the preconditions of the goals of Finnish regional planning and the qualifications for sustainable accessibility due to the forecast population change – in other words to keep the current standard of service – some changes in the service network would be needed. However, as there was only one type of service inspected in this study and as there is uncertainty if the scenarios will happen in the future, the conclusions that can be drawn from the results are restricted. Still, studying the accessibility of a single service is useful as such as the needs for different type of services are different, and if it will give some hints of the future accessibility of services in general at the same time, even though just in a few scenarios, it can be easier to be prepared for the future.