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Journal article
Timber Production Opportunities from Private Native Forests in Southern Queensland
Small-Scale Forestry, Vol.23, pp.1-24
2024
Abstract
Historically, Queensland’s private native forests have supplied between 40 and 70% of the hardwood resource to the state’s primary processors. Hardwood timber production from state-owned native forests and plantations in Queensland has decreased substantially in recent decades, increasing the hardwood timber industry’s reliance on private native forests. However, timber production opportunities from these forests are poorly understood. This study assessed the future wood supply capacity from private native forests in southern Queensland assuming alternative levels of landowner interest in management for timber production and willingness to invest in silvicultural treatment. Commercial and harvestable private native forests in southern Queensland were classified into six forest types and their spatial distributions were assessed. Potential growth rates for each forest type were estimated based on available literature and expert opinion, and their ability to supply logs to industry with and without silvicultural treatments was projected. Commercial and harvestable private native forests were found to cover an area of approximately 1.9 M ha in southern Queensland, of which spotted gum (693,000 ha) and ironbark (641,500 ha) forest types are most common. The private native forest estate is distributed over 17,665 landholdings (LotPlans), with 17% of these accounting for 66% of the commercial and harvestable resource. Most private native forests have not been actively managed for timber production and are in poor condition. Nevertheless, they presently have the potential to supply between about 150,000 and 250,000 m3 of logs to industry per annum. Silvicultural treatments were found to have the potential to increase the mean annual increment of these forests by a factor of between two and four, indicating substantial opportunities to increase harvestable log volumes in the medium and long-term. Private native forests in southern Queensland could potentially more than compensate for the supply gap left by the declining area of state-owned native forests that are available for timber harvesting. Actual forest management performed and log volumes supplied to market will depend on the forest management decisions of thousands of individual landholders, which are influenced by their heterogeneous management objectives, the policy environment, perceptions of sovereign risk, timber markets and the long payback periods in forestry. An accommodating forest policy environment and landholder willingness to invest in forest management could maintain and potentially increase private hardwood log supply to industry, which would support farm income diversification and regional employment opportunities.
Details
- Title
- Timber Production Opportunities from Private Native Forests in Southern Queensland
- Authors
- Ben Francis (Corresponding Author) - The University of QueenslandTyron Venn (Author) - The University of QueenslandTom Lewis (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Forest Research Institute
- Publication details
- Small-Scale Forestry, Vol.23, pp.1-24
- Publisher
- Springer Dordrecht
- Date published
- 2024
- DOI
- 10.1007/s11842-023-09550-2
- ISSN
- 1873-7854; 1873-7617
- Copyright note
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Grant note
- This research was funded by Forest and Wood Products Australia, and the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
- Organisation Unit
- Forest Research Institute
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99978498302621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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