Changing Landowner Preferences, Forest Fragmentation, and Absenteeism: Results from Virginia

Greg Amacher (Presenter), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

M. Christine Conway, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

J. Sullivan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Landowner surveys have been administered over the last 3 years in Virginia to revisit several questions about nonindustrial and industrial landowner behavior.   The overall goal has been to assess how increasing absenteeism and fragmentation of forest parcels affect landowner behavior, specifically willingness to participate in forest markets.  Landowners in a range of cover types have been sampled, including mountain, coastal plane, and piedmont regions, as well as landowners holding pine plantations, hardwood, and mixed pine-hardwood stands.  Nonindustrial behavior considered includes harvesting, reforestation, propensity to not harvest and leave timber as bequests for future generations, the relationship between debt and forest market participation, and the propensity to shift land into or out of forestry-related uses.  Recently, the work has been extended to studying prices nonindustrial landowners would have to receive before participating in markets, as a way of predicting the market response to changing prices and harvest access.  This work identifies a ‘reservation price,’ unique to each type of landowner, that can be compared with market prices to gauge how close or far groups of landowners are from harvesting timber.  Finally, the work on industrial landowners has investigated how characteristics of the market and landowner affect timber bid prices as well as the competitiveness of timber sales.  Several broad conclusions emerge from this work: forest fragmentation and absenteeism are interrelated issues, failure to examine all landowner decisions will yield an incomplete picture of landowner behavior, reservation prices are sensitive to both landowner preferences and characteristics of the forest market, such as parcelization, absenteeism, and debt positions, and the competitiveness of bids and timber sale prices are very sensitive to indicators of fragmentation, but in surprising ways.  By and large, our work shows that two types of margins are developing as a result of fragmentation.

Workshop III: Forest Uses

Sustaining
Southern
Forests

a conference sponsored by the Southern Forest Resource Assessment