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

Abstract

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.