Wood is a limited resource which is exposed to a continuously growing global
demand not least because of a politically fostered bioenergy use. One approach
to master the challenge to sustainably meet this increasing wood demand is
short rotation forestry (SRF). However, SRF is only gradually evolving and it
is not fully understood which determinants hamper its expansion. This study
provides theoretical insights into economic and environmental determinants of
an SRF expansion and their interplay. This assessment requires the
incorporation of farmers' decision-making based on an explicit investment
appraisal. Therefore, we use an agent-based model to depict the decision-
making of profit-maximizing farmers facing the choice between SRF, the
cultivation of conventional annual agricultural crops and abstaining from
cultivation (fallow land). The land use decisions are influenced by general
economic determinants, such as market prices for wood and annual crops, and by
site-dependent determinants, such as the environmental site quality. We found
that the willingness to pay for SRF-based products and for annual crops most
strongly influences the coverage of SRF in the landscape. SRF will in most
cases be established on sites with low productivity. However, a decrease in
the willingness to pay for annual crops will lead to a reallocation of SRF
plantations to sites with higher productivity. Furthermore, our model results
indicate that the impact of the distance to processing plants on farmers'
decisions strongly depends on general economic determinants and the given
spatial structure of the underlying natural landscape. Analysing the relative
importance of different determinants of an SRF expansion, this study gives
insights into the approach of using SRF to sustainably meet the growing wood
demand. Moreover, these insights are taken as a starting point for the design
of effective government interventions to promote SRF
