The future of forest research in a changing world

New challenges are facing the managers of the world's forests, with stakeholders demanding a broader range of goods and services. Balancing the demand for forest products and the responsibility for forest protection is not an easy task. The earlier narrow perspective of wood-resources sustainability has often been transferred to an equally narrow biological diversity conservation perspective. Segregation, in which most of the fiber is produced in plantations, attempts to solve the conflict between conservation and wood production. Biotechnology offers a strategy to gain more wood on less land and with less harm to the environment.The traditional forest research community has not always been able to react properly and promptly to the needs of the users of research results. Consequently, forest research has lost ground to other disciplines. Forest researchers should not consider the newcomers as competitors but instead should try to create more collaboration with those who are interested in solving forest-related problems but do not belong to the old forestry family. There is also a clear need to improve the interface between the research and user communities. Very often the problem is not so much a need to obtain more data than in discovering how to find the most appropriate existing information. In general, forest research should be more cost-efficient. Adopting a more business-like environment should not, however, lead to an excessively result-oriented, short-term way of thinking, to the extent that basic research, and also quality of research, would be in danger.