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Pests and diseases pose a growing threat to woodlands from both endemic sources, and increasingly, from interregional transmission. Strong comparative analyses of this threat are needed in order to develop preventative measures. Such analyses should include estimates of the potential worst-case loss from all relevant pest and disease (P&D) threats to key tree species. Existing approaches tend to focus on individual assessments of the risk from a single pest or disease, or assessments of overall trends. Effective risk management requires more comprehensive quantified assessments of the overall threat to woodland that includes comparisons of the threat to individual tree species and identification of the potentially most damaging P&Ds. Such assessments support important policy and management decisions including species selection; preventative action; and the size of buffers against losses from forest carbon projects. Here we present a new approach that supports a systematic, risk-based assessment of the future threat to a given woodland from all known individual P&Ds, and to constituent individual tree species, based on a risk management approach taken from the finance sector, but hitherto not applied in an ecological context. Unknown or unidentified pests and diseases can systematically be added in future as identified. We demonstrate the method through a case study evaluating the threat to projects certified under the UK's Woodland Carbon Code. The approach can be adapted to any woodland resource worldwide. Its novelty lies in the simplification of complex threats, from numerous pests and diseases, to measures that can be used by a range of forest stakeholders.

Landscape planning and design occupies a major role in forest policy in the UK. Since the 1980s, UK forests have been managed increasingly for multi-purpose objectives, a policy which has been underpinned by international agreements on sustainable forestry. Within this context, there is a need to understand public preferences for forest landscapes in designing policies that meet the needs of multi-purpose forestry. This paper is based on a study to investigate public willingness to pay (WTP) for regular visual and recreational access to a wide variety of generic forest landscapes. A total of 33 forest landscapes were investigated, each of which was defined as a combination of the configuration of the planting and the landscape factors. Computer-generated images of each of these landscapes were used to underpin a series of choice experiments conducted as part of a questionnaire survey of over 400 households across Great Britain. The results confirm the importance of landscape in contributing to the social and environmental benefits provided by forests and suggests that current policies of woodland expansion may generate additional benefits especially if more woodland is located close to urban populations. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these results for forest policy across the UK.

Australia and New Zealand are committed to the concept of sustainable forest management. Extensive portions of native forest in each country are managed primarily for conservation purposes. Substantial investment has been made in both countries to establish planted production forests, which together comprise 54% of the global Pinus radiata estate. Financial criteria will determine the extent of planted production forest in the future; but environmental legislation has been enacted to sustain the productive capacity of existing ecosystems. Indicators of forest ecosystem productive capacity should include assessments of trends in growth and yield over time, and be linked to changes in site quality. Detecting change in forest productive capacity due to changes in site quality between rotations remains difficult due to confounding effects of silviculture, genetic stocks, disease and insects, and climate variability and change. Additional site-specific technical information and predictive models are required to develop indicators of sustainable forest management practices for environmental monitoring in plantations at the management unit level. Cost-effective monitoring will involve application of indicators at varying spatial and temporal scales.

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