Probabilistic typology of private forest owners: A tool to target the development of new market for ecosystem services

Understanding how and why private forest owners manage their forests is the basis for efficient policy, and improperly targeting forest owners can lead to inefficiencies. Furthermore, new markets for ecosystem services have been proposed as a way to diversity private forest owner revenues and move forest management in a more sustainable direction. Based on a survey of 220 French private forest owners, we perform a cluster analysis to identify distinct groups of forest owners according to their stated behaviors. Owners were clustered based on their rating of statements derived from existing profiles as well as their rating of the importance of new markets and social recognition. We then test if our owner classifications are sufficient predictors of the valuation of a set of ecosystem services, explicitly comparing an individual's stated need for ecosystem services to their perceived social demand. Our results confirm previously reported forest owner typologies of European forest owners, and show that these typologies can meaningfully explain variation in ecosystem service demand. This is important as the preservation and production of ecosystem services are increasingly important components of forest management and policy.