Since prehistoric time man has used wood to build their environment. The material?s availabilitycombined with its good mechanical properties has often made it the material of choice. Like allmaterials exposed to natures degradative processes the properties of wood decreases over time.Rot, UV radiation and attacks by insects and pests damage wood if not protected. Since we wantwhat we build to consist, optimizing our building materials durability is of great interest.Techniques and methods for increasing the endurance of wood have been developed in severaldifferent places and for a long time.

Public concern about the release of toxic compounds from wood-based products drives legislation towards enforcing industries to find and use more sustainable solutions for wood treatment. Plant oils are good alternatives to treat wood, minimizing or even neutralizing the impact on the environment. Wood modification with epoxidised linseed oil (ELO) and acetic acid as catalyst has proven a suitable method to impregnate and protect wood. However, the mixture presents a serious inconvenience because of the quick polymerization of the ingredients that limits its practical application. Therefore, this study was designed to evaluate an alternative method using a two-step process which bypassed the problem above.

This essay concerns the visual trade grading of pine and spruce.In the 1800s developed rules for sorting of wood. The rules used to facilitate the export trade.The terms of the regulatory sorting systems developed in the 1900s. While it still used some of the older terms.The essay deals with how the grading rules affect the use of wood and how the rule work and how the terminology works.Some of the terms used for sorting are O/S, Kvinta, Utskott and A,B,C,D.You sorting by counting the numbers of knots, cracks and other characteristics of each piece of wood.The sawmills have much influence in how the rules developed.Today it is often already determined in the sawmills which uses each piece of wood most have..

The biodiversity of the Swedish forest has degenerated since the beginning of the 19th century when fire suppression and large scale logging first occurred. Together with a changed land use, these actions today have had a negative influence on many forest dwelling species, due to gradual reduction of natural processes, successions and different structures from the forest ecosystem. The Swedish Forest Act, together with different environment certifications, have today encouraged private persons and forest companies, among them Holmen Skog, to work actively to improve nature conservation. The aim of this study was to, by field inventories of already existing nature values, literature studies, recommendations from scientific reports and ecological gap analysis as a basis, make a management plan, for a non-production area, to conserve or improve the prerequisites for biodiversity. ?Storskogsberget? is located in the coastal area of Västerbotten County, 35 km from the city of Umeå.

Forest management plans have been sold to private forest owners by wood supplying companies for a long time. These plans are considered to be effi-cient tools to identify measures and wood volumes, and are simply a starting point for discussions between private forest owners and round wood pur-chasers. However, large variations are observed between different purchas-ers, in their usage of the plans. The purpose of this report is to identify to what extent a forest management plan can promote an increase in the amount of wood which a round wood purchaser can obtain and to find differences in the way of using the plans between different wood purchasers. Furthermore, the purpose is also to ana-lyse if varying owner structures can be underlie variations in the selling of forest management plans. Qualitative interviews with nine of Stora Enso?s round wood purchasers were performed.

Stump wood is a hot alternative when the heating plants demands more and more forest fuel. The aim with the study has bean to calculate the costs in four different systems for transportations of stump wood, examine if there are any differences in fuel quality for the stump wood in the different systems, analyse if the fuel quality in stump wood is affected with the time it lays by the road side and how much space the stump wood demands on the road side. To calculate the costs for the different systems a system analysis was carried out, where some of the costs were collected through field studies on Holmen Skog stump experiment and other costs were collected from literature and contacts. Data for the fuel quality study was collected from Eons heat plant in Norrköping. Data for the study of how much space stump wood takes along a roadside was collected from field studies.

Headwater streams are affected by anthropogenic impacts at multiple scales. One aspect of human impact is sediment transport associated to the abundance of stream structures as large woody debris and the composition of the riparian zone from forest to agricultural landscapes. Riparian buffer zones and stream structures like Dead wood are considered as generally important structures for protection against an increasing amount of sediment particles in the water. Hence, in this study these structures were quantified in thirty different stream segments on land and in the water. To measure the transport of sediment Whitlock-Vibert boxes were used in three different types of landscapes; forest, transition and fields. The boxes were left in the stream segments for three months, the taken up and dried and weighed. The results showed that the transition-land in Frösvidalsån had the highest sediment transport. The second highest transport of sediment was in Blackstaån at the fields.

Deciduous forests are, according to the National Environmental Quality Objectives, a priority area. Deciduous forests are rich in species and the occurrence of Dead wood is an important factor for biodiversity. In order to identify valuable deciduous forests for bio-diversity, conservation needs good analyses and planning tools. Habitat models combined with geographic information systems can be used to study the spatial structure of suitable habitat. The Lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor) has been proposed as an indicator species for deciduous forests, since this species is highly specialized on insect larvae in Dead wood and requires large areas of deciduous-rich environments. Many riparian forest with high species richness and high nature conservation values are found along the Ume river in Umeå municipality.

I have chosen in this work to examine which factors are affecting the artificially creation of a tree cavity containing decomposed wood. The purpose of the work is to find out which factors are affecting the most when a tree cavity is created, and to apply these results when you artificially try to create a tree cavity. The need to create tree cavities comes from the situation where many tree cavity living beetles finds themselves today. When existing trees are to pass out there will be no suitable inheritors yet. The work was initially to focus on cavities created from cut branches.

This final thesis is initiated by the wood fuel department at the Swedish forest company Sveaskog as part of a project which also involves two other final thesises. The overall goal of the project is to investigate Sveaskog´s possibilities to produce and sell different wood fuel assortments in Västerbotten and the southern parts of Norrland. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how much wood fuel Sveaskog can produce in the area during the next five years and what that would cost. Furthermore the thesis will investigate the total possible supply of wood fuel from all other possible producers in the area. Treated assortments are forest residues from final fellings, whole trees from direct wood fuel thinnings, non industrial wood and industrial by-products from sawmills. The main effort to investigate Sveaskog´s production possibilities has been made to calculate the possible annual amount of forest residues and fuel from wood fuel thinnings that can be produced.

With the elevated oil prices of today it is necessary to look for other heating alternatives. If the oil price continues to develop in the same way it has done the last years it will soon be impossible for many producing garden companies to survive. The purpose of this diploma work is to compare three different fuel options in order to find the most economic one considering the conditions of Katrinebergs Handelsträdgård AB. In relation to oil it is profitable to change to any of the three alternatives: wood chips, wood pellets and grain. The most profitable option is to change to wood chips. This alternative has a payoff time less than three years and after that the annual saving compared to the oil is relatively high. The annual cost is 65 % of the cost of the oil alternative.

The study was carried out as a time study of five wood chippers placed on trucks,so?called huggbilar. They are trucks with built?in wood chipper, chip bowl and crane pulling a chip trailer. The system is used for chipping wood fuel, transporting, and delivering the chips to heating plants.

This study demonstrates how norms and ideals about sexuality and gender expression are used in the TV-show The Walking Dead. An intermediate study is made on the comic books? two same sex couples as they are compared to how they are represented in the TV-show. Tara Chambler and Alisha, a same sex couple who only exist in the TV-show, not in the comic books, are also analysed. Queer theory and an intersectional perspective are used to discover how different power asymmetries are connected to each other through an active interplay.

In 1994 a new Forestry Act was accepted in Sweden. One of the aims of the law is to raise consideration forpreservation of biodiversity. Since the new law got accepted and some time has passed, there now lie someinterest in examining whether the law has been effective towards its purpose. Methods suitable for analysishave been examined during this study. The content of this pilot study is based around five parameters whichcan be used to validate the effects of the new law.

The objective of this study was to contribute with suggestions of nature preservation managements of selected forest objects of high nature values managed by the Swedish state-owned forest company Sveaskog. Many forests with high natural potential are relatively rare today due to modern forestry, where wood production is the main purpose. Sveaskog?s policy is to consider and to priority nature conservation on valuable objects. This assessment includes objects that in the future may develop into nature reserves.