Foto Michael Ekstrand
The proportion of pine planted on land where it grows best has doubled in six years in the southern parts of Sweden after many years of hard work, there is now a clear trend where forest owners plant pine instead of spruce. Source: Timberbiz
According to the Swedish Forest Agency’s forest consultant and game expert Lars Ingemarsson it makes the forests more vital and robust, which benefits both nature conservation.
For a long time, it has been a problem that spruce has been planted to an increasing extent, mainly in the southern but also central parts of Sweden, at the expense of the pine.
This has been done because the landowner wants to avoid grazing damage from moose and other deer that like to eat pine.
The grazing damage leads to quality damage and loss of production, but in the worst case can cause the pine to die.
The development with an increasing proportion of spruce is a consequence of spruce being planted on lean soils where it does not really thrive.
Then the spruce grows worse and becomes more susceptible to damage.
The Swedish Forest Agency has worked intensively to reverse the development and as recently as March this year introduced new regulations that prohibit landowners from planting spruce on land where pine is better suited.
As of 2016, systematic and over the years weighted measurements are available on the proportion of pine in new plantings. The latest statistics for 2022 and shows that 56% of the young forests (1-4 meters high trees) on lean land in Götaland consisted of pine.
This is a clear increase compared with 2021 when the share was 40% and a doubling since 2016, when the share was 28%.
Even in so-called intermediate markets, development is going in the right direction.
“It is important that forest owners hang in and continue to increase the proportion of pine when planting on weak and medium-sized soils,” Lars Ingemarsson said.
“There are individual counties in Götaland that stand out with poorer statistics, somewhat depending on different conditions, where more effort is required.”
In Svealand, the situation generally looks better than in Götaland with a share of pine of 76%, but even here there is an increase in the proportion of planted pine on lean soils.
In the northern parts of Sweden but also in Gävleborg and large parts of Dalarna, an increased proportion of spruce has not been a problem in the same way.
There, the pine makes up 90% on lean soils.
