Recent advances in land owner extension. Proceedings of the IUFRO 3.08 Symposium with a special theme of peer-to-peer learning among land owners, 3–5 April 2011, Kuusamo, Finland

The international IUFRO 3.08 (Small-scale Forestry) Symposium, held in Kuusamo, Finland, April 3–5 2011, gathered total of 30 participants from Australia, Canada, Finland, Indonesia, Latvia, Nepal, Norway, Sweden and USA to discuss recent scientific research and practical advances in woodland owner extension and advisory. The publication at hand contains the programme and proceedings of the Symposium, which was organized in collaboration by Metla, University of Helsinki and Oulu University of Applied Sciences along with the NordPlus Adult project “Mapping a peer-to-peer model for enhancing adult learning among land owners”. The overall purpose of the Symposium was to shed light on the new forms and approaches of land owner extension, forestry advisory and rural communication with a special focus on peer-to-peer learning among land owners. Based on an open call for presentations, altogether 22 abstracts were accepted, and the contributed presentations covered a wide range of topics relating to peer-to-peer and adult learning, cooperation of forest owners, forest planning, extension and services, and forestry advisory in the context of reshaping communities. In the invited keynote talks, benefits of land owners’ cooperation, social learning systems, and the Finnish forestry extension activities were introduced and elaborated. The five contributed full papers assessed the cases of land owner extension from the viewpoints of Finland, Latvia, Norway, the Philippines and Sweden.