The fitness app Strava provides insight into how forest clear-cutting affects Norwegians’ recreation activities. Experts argue that the value from recreation services lost due to clear-cutting exceeds the value of timber provisioning services gained, particularly in peri-urban forests.
With high timber prices in recent years, many people have seen their local forests harvested or new forest roads cutting through familiar hiking areas. Visual studies have shown that people prefer forest landscapes without obvious interventions, especially areas without clear-cutting. But how does this aesthetic preference affect people’s actual use of forests for recreation and physical activity?
Researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) analyzed 2.7 million fitness activities along forest trails recorded by the Strava app, before and after clear-cutting, to determine whether clear-cutting impacts how people use nature.
“There are more than 70 published scientific papers in the Nordic region showing that clear-cuts are the least preferred type of forest. This study is one of the few that examines how new clear-cuts actually affect recreational use,” says NINA researcher Vegard Gundersen, who has studied the topic for many years.
And clear-cuts do have an effect:
“We found that after logging, there was a 3.7% decrease in the number of hikers in the affected areas. Overall, we estimate that clear-cutting displaces about 1.5 million recreational activities annually, including hiking, cycling, and skiing. The clearest effect is seen near urban areas,” says NINA researcher Zander Venter, who analyzed the Strava data.
Undersøkelser viser at folk visuelt sett foretrekker skog uten tydelige inngrep, slik som denne. Foto: Vegard Gundersen / NINA.
Hogstflater er minst populært av alle typer skog i visuelle undersøkelser. Foto. Vegard Gundersen / NINA.
More Skiing After Clear-Cutting
Although people prefer old-growth forests, other factors—such as accessibility and infrastructure—can play an equally important role in usage. Previous research suggests that the construction of forest roads and open areas after logging can in some cases improve access and thereby promote recreational activity. As a result, the effect of clear-cutting varies greatly between different types of activities.
“So while the overall effect on recreational activity is negative, we found an increase in cross-country skiing after clear-cutting. The logged areas have a different visual effect in winter—they provide open spaces with light, and the snow covers the traces of logging. Even though we see a positive effect on skiing, skiing makes up a smaller portion of overall outdoor activities”, Gundersen explains.
Clear-Cutting Can Have Significant Consequences for the Recreational Value of Forests
In other European countries, natural capital accounting shows that outdoor recreation is the ecosystem service with the greatest socioeconomic value. The value of outdoor recreation is substantial because seemingly small values per user add up across large numbers of people, especially in urban-proximate recreational areas. Even small percentage impacts on outdoor recreation due to open clear-cuts in urban forests accumulate over the years. This leads to an overall loss of value that can be significant compared to the value of the harvested timber.
At the same time, the researchers’ estimates of recreational value loss are conservative, as they do not include potential losses from other activities such as mushroom and berry picking, hiking, and camping off the trail network. The effects on biodiversity from clear-cutting, or on public health due to reduced nature-based activity, were also not included in the study.
“Still, we document substantial socioeconomic losses for outdoor recreation due to clear-cutting in Østmarka, Nordmarka, and other urban forests in Norway,” says NINA researcher David Barton, who works on the economic valuation of ecosystem services.
A regulation on forest management and operations in Oslo allows the municipality to deny logging when it poses a ‘significant disadvantage for outdoor recreation.’
“What constitutes ‘significant’ in politics and economics is relative. The question of how large the losses of ecosystem services, biodiversity, and public health need to be before they are considered ‘significant’ compared to the value of timber from clear-cutting is a political one. We need to work together to find out how forestry can be locally adapted so that it is not ‘significantly’ negative,” Barton concludes.
Read the full article: Impacts of forest clear-cutting on recreational activity: Evidence from crowdsourced mobility data
Contact: Vegard Gundersen