One aspect
of societal compatibility is the potential to get in conflict with
people who seek recreation in the forests. This group of forest users is not
homogenous and so their demands are diverse, too. This makes it difficult to
fully meet their needs.
Some
studies have tried to describe this population of forest users. As an example,
we can quote the research work of Kleinhückelkotten, who correlated forest
visitor’s characteristics with SINUS-milieus that are widely used in
socio-economics. SINUS-milieus try to categorize people based on the intersection of social class (defined by income as lower or upper class) and the main orientation like traditional values, believe in modernization or reorientation and experimentation as shown in the figure.
Though these results are only representative for Germany at
beginning of this century and cannot be transferred to other countries without
adaptations, the basic information seems to be relevant in general. The groups
are:
But all forest visitors have one common
need: they use the forest roads as their access to the forest and don’t want to
be disturbed. consequently, if we keep the roads clear for people to
move on them, this can help to improve the acceptance of forest techniques and
operations. In Technodiversity, we have invented the S-class that describes the grade of disturbance on the forest road by harvesting operations.
(See more
under TDiv PR1-E02)
Lit.: Kleinhückelkotten S., Calmbach M., Glahe H.-P.,
Stöcker R., Wippermann C. & Wippermann K. 2009: Kommunikation für eine
nachhaltige Waldwirtschaft. Forschungsverband Mensch & Wald, M&W
–Bericht 09/01, Hannover, S. 33 ff
