Selective cutting and the Swedish Forestry Act

For most Swedish forests, the current Swedish Forestry Act is not an obstacle if you want to use selective cutting (plockhuggning) and manage a continuous-cover system. That said, there are two parts of the Act that can sometimes create hurdles for continuous-cover forestry.

The first concerns the requirement to notify the authorities of a regeneration harvest (föryngringsavverkning) if the remaining standing volume drops below a certain threshold (under Section 5). The second concerns minimum stand age before such a “regeneration harvest” may be carried out (under Section 10).

Both requirements can be a poor fit for layered/uneven-aged forestry, because the rules were developed at a time when they were intended to regulate clearcut forestry (trakthyggesbruk) only. Their purpose is to ensure the forest is kept dense enough to maintain production until the final felling. In selective cutting, by contrast, the goal is often to keep the stand open enough for continuous regeneration.

The consequence is that landowners who use selective cutting may need to submit a regeneration-harvest notification every time a stand is harvested. Whether it’s required depends on how open the forest becomes after the thinning/harvest. In practice, measures are rarely blocked on these grounds—but situations can arise where you must wait until the stand’s mean age reaches the minimum allowed level. In the worst case, that can make it harder to achieve your intended removal levels and remaining standing volume.