Quality of forest management supervision in private forests and the knowledge of their owners in the field of forest management

Private forests in Poland occupy an area of 1788 thousand ha, including 1683 thousand ha of forests owned by the natural persons. There are usually 2-3 forest plots constituting single ownership. According to the Act on forests, the supervision over forest management in private forests is carried out by the county authorities. They may entrust it to the managers of the State Forests units on the basis of an individual agreement. Due to the adopted solutions, supervision over forest management in private forests is dispersed. The aim of the research was to present: forest owners (farmers) assessment of the quality of supervision, the level of basic knowledge of forest owners regarding the legal aspects of forest management and the analysis of the relationship between the results of the assessment of the quality of supervision and the level of knowledge of the surveyed forest owners presented in a regional layout. The work was based on the results of a computer-assisted survey conducted in April 2019 by the Kantar Polska S.A. agency on a random, representative nationwide sample of 1003 forest owners. The largest group of forest owners rated the quality of supervision as good (rate 4) and very good (rate 5). The age, sex and education of the respondent did not affect the assessment of the quality of supervision, but it differed regionally. The results of research on the level of basic knowledge of forest owners indicate that it is not at the satisfactory level and it is also strongly diversified regionally, which can be partly explained by the historically shaped, diversified share of private forests. Considering the growing area of private forests, their natural and economic importance, measures should be taken to improve both the quality of supervision and the level of forestry knowledge of forest owners.