Look at what they do: a revised approach to communication strategy towards private forest owners

Private forest owners in Sweden and other countries are becoming an increasingly heterogeneous group as regards their experience and knowledge of forestry. Over the past decade, a number of studies have been conducted with the aim of describing different aspects of forest owners. However, little attention has been paid to the owners' self-activity and how they learn. With the overall aim of exploring the relationship between self-activity and knowledge to use it as a starting point for new recommendations for planned communication towards forest owners, this study examines the extent and type of the work different categories of private forest owners perform, and from whom or where they learn. An analysis of data from a mail questionnaire and from the Database for Forest Owner Analysis showed that self-activity is common in all categories of owners but more frequent among male and resident forest owners. Forest owners have relatively few knowledge sources. Besides being self-taught, the most common ways of learning are from their fathers and from attending forest days. The study also shows a strong connection between self-activity and self-estimated knowledge of forestry. The recommendation for communication planning is therefore to use the extent and type of self-activity among different groups of forest owners as a point of departure for planning communication strategies.