General information: In Austria, a protective forest is a forest whose task is: i) to protect the soil and maintain growth capacity on sites prone to soil erosion, soil degradation, climatic and/or edaphic inhibition of forest regeneration; and/or; ii) to protect human property, infrastructure and cropland from the impact of natural hazards and other damaging environmental influences. In the case of the first task, this forest is a so-called “site-protective forest,” and a forest with the second function is defined as an “object-protective forest.” The “protection forest definition matrix” (Kleemayr et al., 2019; Figure 1) gives an overview. The Austrian forest development plan distinguishes between four main functions of forests: protective function (PF), welfare function (WF), recreational function (RF) and economic function (EF). The importance of the functions varies strongly. In the Tyrol and other more mountainous regions, the average distribution is: 70 percent PF, 25 percent EF and 5 percent for RF and WF combined. In comparison, for the whole of Austria, the average distribution is around 30 percent PF, 65 percent EF, 4 percent RF and 1 percent WF. With expanding settlement area, infrastructure and industrial activities in mountainous areas, the value of at-risk objects has significantly risen in the last few decades. As such, both site-protective and object-protective forests are of the highest importance for Austria.
