Economic balancing of forest management under storm risk, the case of the Ore Mountains (Germany)

Storm events shorten the optimal rotation compared with the classical Faustmann solution. When the neighbourhood-protection-effect changes simultaneously with site productivity and site-related arrival rates, analyses in such complex environments involve numerous, qualitatively ambiguous effects that ask for empirical escorts. We use empirical material from the Ore Mountains (Germany), where storm damages were analysed between 1831 and 1981. The calculated results show the complex interweavements of the different factors concerning storm risk. The multiple effects under storm risk ask for specific forest management strategies, which cannot be found intuitively: more complex analyses need support of economic calculations. (C) 2014 Department of Forest Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umed. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.