Data retrieved from airborne laser scanning represents a new source of forest data. Today, the technology has matured so that it can function in an operational environment. The aim of this study was to compile areas of application of laserdata in forestry. Moreover to analyze costs and accessibility of laserdata. The goal was to provide private forest owners information to support assessments of possible benefits of laserdata.

Participating in peace support operations has been and remains a significant part of the Swedish defense and security politics. Since the end of the Cold War, the Swedish national defence has been more and more dismantled, in favor of international peace support operations which have become an increasingly important task for the Swedish defence. Why then, is Sweden so engaged in conflicts so far from home? Using two classic theories of international politics, realism and liberalism, this study aims to shed light on arguments from the Swedish parliament on why it is important for Sweden to participate in international peace support operations. After analyzing arguments of the Social Democrat Party, the Moderate Party, the Green Party and the Liberal Party concerning three different peace support operations which Sweden has participated in, the result shows that although both realism and liberalism are influencing the parties? argumentation, liberalism is the theory which is used more often.

The concept of school forest was drafted in 1970 by the Forest in School organization and is defined as an area occupied by a school for outdoor educational activity. The main purpose of this study was to examine how schools use the school forest in practice, how it can be linked to the forest as an ecosystem service and find out how the forest is taken into consideration in the spatial planning. The study is mainly qualitative in nature and has been based on interviews conducted with educators engaged in outdoor education at four selected schools in a municipality in Sweden. Focus has been on the cultural ecosystem services for school forest, for example the physical characteristics that are considered as positive, forest influence on students' physical / mental health and the educational benefits available to be in the woods. Search has also been made to see how the forest is taken into consideration in the spatial planning and also what a contract agreements involves.

The purpose of the survey was to find out how early childhood teachers work with the curriculum of I Ur och Skur with children between 1-3 years in the forest and how such educators are using the outdoor pedagogy in the forest environment in preschool.In order to answer the study's aim and objectives interviews were performed with six teachers in I Ur och Skur kindergartens.What emerged from this study is that forest excursions are a central part of the curriculum and is seen as their educational place. The teachers are working to create a feeling of security among the youngest children of enjoying the woods and also to raise an interest in the children. Natural materials are used during the forest stay and no other toys or materials.The results reveal that educators work to get the smallest children to use and develop their imagination at play and at the same time they are involved with the children in their discovery of the woods. With the smallest children in kindergarten it involves being on the level of children and as a teacher to have the flexibility to change the forest stay environment if needed..

The supply of raw materials has always been an important issue in the Swedish Forest industry. Buying timber from local suppliers is important. To ensure raw materials to their industries the forest company must offer good prices and good business deals to their suppliers. The aims with this work are to find out how the contact between private suppliers of raw materials and how the forest company can be developed. To be able to do a complete study of the problems connecting with this subject a quality interview study has been done.

In the forest sector, non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners commonly interact with numerous stakeholders (e.g. forest managers, timber buyers, harvesting contractors and advisors) for counseling, planning, selling and hiring. Forest management is therefore built and influenced by the relationships between NIPF owners and other stakeholders. In the local context of a Southern Sweden, the Swedish Forest Agency (SFA) and the Southern Forest Owners Association (SÖDRA) are very influential stakeholders in small-scale forest management. Based on qualitative interviews and by means of grounded theory, an analysis of the relationships between NIPF owners and the mentioned organizations was carried out in order to understand the social context at the genesis of forest management decisions.

Silviculture in young stands in Sweden is below the mark concerning what has to be done in the forest, and it is time to solve the problem. The problem will not be solved only by the private forest owners, professional help is needed. Skogsägarna Mellanskog is one of four forest unions in Sweden who wants to play a role and take responsibility for forestry in the middle of Sweden. This academic essay is based on a market survey sent to 350 forest owners in the Örebro district. 186 of them answered the questions, giving a response frequence of 53 percentage. The purpose of the essay is to find the determining factors which will make a forest owner to find a collaborator when planning and carrying out the silviculture measures in young stands. The result of the survey shows that the forest owners are anxious about the price and the costs. The costs have a severe effect if the silviculture measures in young stands will be carried out or not.

Stands where pre commercial thinning has been ignored or inadequate often tend to have high stem density and low average diameter when they reach heights of thinning. In such stands, it can often be expensive to do a conventional pulpwood harvest as a first thinning. This study investigates the development of the stands and the economic outcome of forest fuel extraction, or a combined harvest as alternatives to the ordinary pulpwood harvest. Simulations in Heureka StandWise were performed for two thin and dense stands, which were constructed by data from the Swedish National Forest Inventory. The simulations show that the extraction of forest fuel in first thinning at an early stage can provide higher net revenue compared to conventional pulpwood harvest at the same time or later.

Resignations are common in all business sectors and can also be found among forest machine operators in the forest business. As the industry today faces a lack of forest machine operators it is justified to determine why machine operators choose to quit their jobs. The aim of this study was to a) find out the number of machine operators that have resigned b) identify and analyse the cause for these resignations c) identify the reasons why the machine operators started to work in the forest and d) give suggestions on different measures that will limit resignations amongst forest machine operators. A questionnaire was sent to machine operators who have quit working as employees, contractors or as employees for contractors with Holmen Skog during 2003-2007. 32 machine operators responded to the questionnaire. Interviews were made with 10 machine operators who had answered the questionnaire to gather more qualitative data. The results of the study indicate that fewer forest machine operators change profession than employees in other occupations in Sweden.

In this study I have analysed the history of a forest belonging to Saxåhyttan in Värmland. The study area is 448 hectares and has been used by iron industry since the 16th century. A forest that has been used by man during at least 400 years should have few ecological values. This inventory however shows the opposite. The aim of the study is to interpret the history of the forest in the area, i. e.

Thinning is one of the most important silvicultural activities in middle aged forests, partly to minimize damages and partly because it leads to earlier harvesting revenues and increases the value of the remaining trees. There are many different indices used to describe stand density and thereby the need of thinning in forests today. Studies have shown that forest variables can be estimated with high accuracy using airborne laser scanning and it is likely that the method could also be used to estimate forest density indices. In this study, the possibility of using the forest density index ?H² to determine and map priorities for thinning operations for a forest area was examined.

Many tropical rain forests has been lost or degraded as a result of human activities and environmental factors. Since the level of biodiversity is high in the tropics, maintaining these areas is of great importance. Forests like these are often assumed to benefit from forest restoration and rehabilitation. The INIKEA project area in Eastern Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, aims to improve biodiversity and/or species richness in the degraded forest through enrichment planting with indigenous species. The objective of this thesis was to evaluate how different treatments (liberation, gap-cluster planting and line planting) affect the biodiversity of natural regeneration in different forest types in the Rain forest Restoration Experiment, located in the INIKEA project area.

Data retrieved from airborne laser scanning represents a new source of forest data. Today, the technology has matured so that it can function in an operational environment. The aim of this study was to compile areas of application of laserdata in forestry. Moreover to analyze costs and accessibility of laserdata. The goal was to provide private forest owners information to support assessments of possible benefits of laserdata.

Today's Swedish large-scale forestry uses almost exclusively computer-aided bucking. It allows the harvester computer, using an optimisation price list (steering price list), to maximize the value of each tree. The optimisation price list can be adjusted so that the industry gets the raw material it demands from the forest. There are various simulation programs that can be used when constructing a optimisation price list. The simulation program merchandise a database of stem shapes using a given price list and mimics a harvester's work. To get the demanded raw material for the industry it is important to use a well-adjusted optimisation price list.

Even though battles have been fought in built-up areas for a long time, there have not been any specific theories connected to it. As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, the problem of not having any complete theories with which to analyze military operations in urban terrain becomes bigger. This essay aims to contribute to the field of military theory by investigating if Robert Leonhard?s theory of combined arms can be used in analyzing such operations and to be able to explaining the outcome of them. The main question posed in this essay is; to what extent can Leonhard?s theory explain the outcome of military operations in urban terrain? The method used to answer this question is a comparative method formed as a case study of two military operations in urban terrain, Operation Vigilant Resolve and Operation Phantom Fury, which both took place in Fallujah during the Iraq war 2004. The intention is to test Leonhard?s theory in both cases by assigning the theory several indicators, which are tested in each case. The result shows that the indicators appeared almost equally in both cases, even though one of the operations was said to be a success and the other a failure.