Assessment of the prospects of creating new forests in Ternopil region

Modern globalization processes, both in Ukraine and around the world, are leading to the increasing use of natural resources, including forests. That is why there is a question of assessing the restoration and increase of forest areas, which will ensure sustainable forest development. Purpose of the work is to evaluate the creation of forest resources within the Ternopil region and propose their optimization. Methods. Descriptive, statistical, comparative-geographical, analysis and optimization modeling. Results. The Ternopil region is one of the sparsely forested regions of Ukraine. Forestry enterprises of the region create new forests in the areas available for afforestation in the course of implementation of forestry management programs of the region, but the main limiting factor is the availability of land plots to meet the needs of afforestation. In order to optimize the process of increasing forested land, it is necessary to afforest lands unsuitable for agricultural production and to transfer self-forested lands to forestry enterprises. However, one of the obstacles to the transfer of land for the use of forestry enterprises is the reluctance to lose valuable assets in the form of land, and the vague prospect of receiving dividends. The state forestry enterprises of the region submitted applications to the city, village and village councils for the allocation of land plots, only some positive responses were received. It is also worth mentioning the problem of collective farm forests, which are currently not provided for use by forestry enterprises of the region and within which neither protection nor use of forest resources is carried out. The main problem for such forests is their transfer for permanent use to state or communal forestry enterprises, or communal enterprises with created specialized forestry units. Therefore, the optimal way out of such a situation can be considered the creation of communal forestry enterprises in territorial communities of the region, which would have the opportunity to gradually create new forests on such a basis. Conclusions. Thus, the identified problems and trends and problems of meeting the needs of the region in forests and achieving the optimal indicator of forest cover of the region allowed to open an alternative way to solve this problem on the basis of direct managers of potential land plots that can be afforested.