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Sustainability and the optimal provision of the various ecosystem services is an essential task in forest management. In this study, we deal with the optimization of forest tending to achieve the maximal long-term provision of financial incomes from wood at a minimal level of ecological risks for selected small ownership unit. The methods of interactive decision maps and reasonable goals (IDM/RGM) were connected with a modern forest growth simulator to investigate the four-dimensional optimization space and to produce the complete set of Pareto optimal solutions. The four different types of forest owners as potential decision-makers were simulated, and precise management goals in multidimensional target space were defined. Then, the optimal tending system for each forest owner in three stands, differing by the degree of the naturalness of the species composition, was detected. The multi-criteria analysis suggests that predominantly economically oriented forest management still prevails in the Czech and Slovak Republics, which can be as a source of conflicts among forest owners and other stakeholders. The existence of trade-offs between biodiversity, ecological stability and wood production and different owners&rsquo, demands must be taken into account. The possibility of balancing the management risks and wood provision according to the owner&rsquo, s and other stakeholders&rsquo, demands with the aid of the easy-to-apply IDM/RGM methods (and the careful assistance of a specialist experienced in multi-criteria optimization) was introduced. At the same time, the application of real integrative management in small forest areas was demonstrated in practice. After the change of paradigm in forest management, the applied methods should prevent increasing conflicts among owners and society in former socialist countries, which have undergone a fundamental transformation in terms of forest ownership in recent decades.

While sustainable forestry in Europe is characterized by the provision of a multitude of forest ecosystem services, there exists no comprehensive study that scrutinizes their sensitivity to forest management on a pan-European scale, so far. We compile scenario runs from regionally tailored forest growth models and Decision Support Systems (DSS) from 20 case studies throughout Europe and analyze whether the ecosystem service provision depends on management intensity and other co-variables, comprising regional affiliation, social environment, and tree species composition. The simulation runs provide information about the case-specifically most important ecosystem services in terms of appropriate indicators. We found a strong positive correlation between management intensity and wood production, but only weak correlation with protective and socioeconomic forest functions. Interestingly, depending on the forest region, we found that biodiversity can react in both ways, positively and negatively, to increased management intensity. Thus, it may be in tradeoff or in synergy with wood production and forest resource maintenance. The covariables species composition and social environment are of punctual interest only, while the affiliation to a certain region often makes an important difference in terms of an ecosystem service’s treatment sensitivity info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion