Work

Impacts of forest clear-cutting on recreational activity: Evidence from crowdsourced mobility data

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: • People prefer intact forests, but there is little research on behavioural avoidance of forest clear-cuts. • We used before-after-control-impact design using 2.7 M recreational activities from Strava across 10,781 forest clear-cuts. • We found a negative effect on total activity, but positive effect on skiing. • Clear-cutting impacts on recreation were more pronounced near urban areas. • Implications for trade-offs between provisioning and cultural ecosystem services discussed. Intensive forest management practices including stand-replacing clear-cuts continue to dominate silviculture globally, yet their impacts on recreational ecosystem services are largely unknown. While landscape preference studies suggest intact forests are favoured over forest clear-cuts for aesthetics, it’s unclear if this influences recreational behaviour. Analysing a sample of 2.7 M recreational activities (0.4 M pedestrian, 2.1 M cycling and 0.1 M skiing) over Norway during 2017 along forest trails that were within 1 km of a subsequent clear-cut in 2018, we quantified the impact on activity changes observed in 2019 using a before-after-control-impact (BACI) study design. Across the 10,781 clear-cuts included in our analysis, we found a negative effect on pedestrian activity (−3.7 ± 4 %; ± 95 % CI), a neutral effect on cycling activity (0.5 ± 3.5 %) and a positive, but highly variable effect on skiing activity (13.4 ± 15.4 %). Therefore, our results suggest that the research on people’s stated preference for intact and natural forests is corroborated by behavioural avoidance of clear-cut forests during pedestrian activity, but not necessarily cycling or skiing. After taking all activities into account and extrapolating to the total population of recreationists in Norway, we found that clear-cuts displace 1.5 M ± 0.8 M activities annually, with more pronounced impacts near urban areas. We conducted a cross-sectional regression analysis and found effect sizes which corroborate our BACI results, indicating that clear-cuts not only displace, but reduce total recreational activity. Although the reduced activity due to clearcuts is small (0.15 %) relative to the circa 1 billion recreational activities reported in Norway annually, it may be consequential for forestry policy recommendations depending on how one values recreational ecosystem services. In the context of ecosystem service accounting, we 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.

Source: Landscape and Urban Planning

DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2025.105332

Authors: Zander S. Venter, David N. Barton, Vegard Gundersen

Institution: Norwegian Institute for Nature Research

Language: English

Topic: Land Use and Ecosystem Services

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Life on land, Sustainable cities and communities, Good health and well-being

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,120