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There are many factors that determine what forestry activities forest owners carry out in their forest properties and that influence whether forest owners engage in entrepreneurial activity. This paper explores whether the values and objectives of forest owners influence their forestry behaviour and their engagement in entrepreneurial activity. This is done through a review of the literature on private forest owners' typologies based on owners' objectives. The review reveals that typologies typically divide forest owners into two main groups. The primary objective of the first group of owners is production (of wood and non-wood goods and services) usually, although not exclusively, so as to generate economic activity. The primary objective of the second group is consumption (of wood and non-wood goods and services). There is a tacit assumption in the studies reviewed that goals Á . Ní Dhubháin (and objectives do influence forestry behaviour but few studies have actually assessed whether this is the case. The general finding is that forest owners whose objectives are timber production and who are business-oriented are more likely to manage and harvest their stands. No research focusing on the link between owners' objective and wider entrepreneurial activity in forests was found.

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BackgroundEuropean forests have a long record of management. However, the diversity of the current forest management across nations, tree species and owners, is hardly understood. Often when trying to simulate future forest resources under alternative futures, simply the yield table style of harvesting is applied. It is now crucially important to come to grips with actual forest management, now that demand for wood is increasing and the EU Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry Regulation has been adopted requiring ‘continuation of current management practices’ as a baseline to set the Forest Reference Level carbon sink.MethodsBased on a large dataset of 714,000 re-measured trees in National Forest inventories from 13 regions, we are now able to analyse actual forest harvesting.ConclusionsFrom this large set of repeated tree measurements we can conclude that there is no such thing as yield table harvesting in Europe. We found general trends of increasing harvest probability with higher productivity of the region and the species, but with important deviations related to local conditions like site accessibility, state of the forest resource (like age), specific subsidies, importance of other forest services, and ownership of the forest. As a result, we find a huge diversity in harvest regimes. Over the time period covered in our inventories, the average harvest probability over all regions was 2.4% yr-1 (in number of trees) and the mortality probability was 0.4% yr-1. Our study provides underlying and most actual data that can serve as a basis for quantifying ‘continuation of current forest management’. It can be used as a cornerstone for the base period as required for the Forest Reference Level for EU Member States.

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