Using an economic valuation approach, we assessed people's stated preferences for policy aimed at enhancing restoration of functional networks of naturally dynamic boreal forest habitats as a public good. Active landscape restoration can improve the functionality of boreal forest habitats as green infrastructure, which is essential for biodiversity conservation and delivery of multiple ecosystem services that production forests are poor at providing. In contrast, so far designation of protected areas in Fennoscandia has focused on remnant patches of near-natural forests, and not on forest landscape restoration. We assessed citizens' preferences for forest landscape restoration in a transboundary region primarily managed for sustained-yield wood production for the forest industry, and which hosts the transboundary Fulufjället National Parks in Sweden and Norway. protection and restoration of forest naturalness, and (2) a status quo option. The scenario assumed that extension of the protected forest area would imply a compulsory tax administered bilaterally by the two countries. Just over half of the sample, in both countries expressed willingness to pay for forest landscape restoration. Alternatives that contemplated larger extensions of forest landscape restoration were assigned higher willingness-to-pay. Public awareness and support, combined with spatial planning, are necessary for forest landscape restoration to become a viable tool for biodiversity conservation in Scandinavia.
We conducted a discrete choice experiment by asking Swedish and Norwegian citizens to choose among two options for the Fulufjället area, including (1) extension of passive protection on one side or both sides of the border, by additional area
Destination image plays a key role in helping people decide where to travel and affects satisfaction, likelihood of return visits and word of mouth. While photography is not the only way of projecting and perceiving an image, 'a picture paints a thousand words'. The rise of social media and usergenerated content has made the image formation process more complex, and has reduced the extent of control that tourism suppliers can exert on the image they wish to project. It is thus necessary to further investigate whether tourists reproduce the commercialised image in what the literature calls the 'hermeneutic circle of representation' or capture and share their own impressions. This study constructs a categorisation scheme for conducting photography-based image analysis to compare images of two Norwegian destinations as projected by destination management organisations with those shared by Instagram users (perceived image). Results indicate that this circle of representation is not hermeneutic.
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