The article characterizes the experiences, problems, and prospects for the development of forest education on social media, which in Poland has been carried out by the Państwowe Gospodarstwo Leśne Lasy Państwowe (National Forest Holding ‘State Forests’) over the past several years. The activity of foresters (employees of the State Forests with a University Degree) on social media allows contact with the public, i.e. the transmission of knowledge about forests to a wide audience, a rapid response to difficult discussions, often attacking foresters about forest management taking place in public spaces. In addition, social media has great potential for communication between scientists and the public, and even for scientific collaboration (so-called citizen science; scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur scientists). As a result of training in this attractive area of social media, the passion and experience of foresters is increasing the audience on social media for State Forests every year, all of which translates into the need for evaluating and monitoring the data from passive educational methods.

Keywords: social media, forest education, informal education, environmental education, social communication, conflicts, citizen science, foresters

   In this study, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed to predict the gloss of thermally densified wood veneers. A custom application created with MATLAB codes was employed for the development of the multilayer feed-forward ANN model. The wood species, temperature, pressure, measurement direction, and angle of incidence were considered as the model inputs, while the gloss was the output of the ANN model. Model performance was evaluated by using the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), the root mean square error (RMSE), and the coefficient of determination (R²). It was observed that the ANN model yielded very satisfactory results with acceptable deviations. The MAPE, RMSE, and R² values of the testing period of the ANN model were found as 8.556%, 1.245, and 0.9814, respectively. Consequently, this study could be useful for the wood industry to predict the gloss with a smaller number of labour consuming experimental activities.

Keywords: artificial neural network, gloss, prediction, veneer, wood

   Broad social changes are reflected in the forest owner structure, which has become increasingly diverse both demographically and in terms of objectives and values. This naturally also impacts forest owners’ interest towards using their forests as well as to their interest in purchasing various forest management services. This development highlights the need for service providers to better segment their clientele and plan their market communication accordingly. However, a surprisingly small amount of research has focused on the impact of marketing arguments for various forest owner segments.

   This study provides a first attempt to analyse, through a real-life marketing intervention, how effective marketing arguments are at promoting first thinning to female forest owners. For this, three marketing messages were created and sent out to 300 forest owners in Finland. One message explained the importance of first thinning to provide maximal economic income from forests, one explained the importance of first thinning in relation to biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation, and a control message included no value arguments. The results indicate that contrary to our hypothesis, the marketing message with the economic arguments raised more interest towards the first thinning service among female forest owners than the one with biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation values. The results further show that the control message was found to generate the least interest towards first thinning. This indicates that incorporating value arguments do improve the impact of a marketing message.

Keywords: market segmentation, female forest owner, marketing argument, economic values, biodiversity values

   The natural spruce wood has low resistance against biological degradation and weather effects, so further protection is required, up to meeting the durability requirements for wood used in exterior classes. According to the wood preservatives standards, coatings as water repellents belong to the group OS (organic solvent) preservatives. The coatings have a water- repellent function, and they are not toxic, so these advantages make them usable like impregnation material. The objective of this work is impregnation of the spruce wood (Picea abies Karst.) using the “Double vacuum process” with coating material based on polyurethane and acrylic isocyanate resins and determinate the coatings quantity in wood. The impregnation efficiency is expressed through the retention. The coatings retention is compared with the minimal standard prescribed retention of the preservatives, most frequently used, namely creosote, copper chrome arsenate (CCA) and waterborne copper-rich systems like copper azole (CBA-A, Thanalite E), to show the efficiency of the applied double vacuum process. The coating retention is not significantly different from the minimum prescribed retention of creosote and amounts 118–149 kg/m3 or 32 to 38 times higher than the recommended retention of CCA or CBA-A for wood protection in the exterior use. The polyurethane and acrylic wood coatings can be successfully applied for wood impregnation purposes.

Keywords: impregnation, retention, spruce wood, polyurethane coatings, acrylic isocyanate coatings