We conducted a quantitative study of private forest owner management behavior based on face-to-face interviews
with 380 randomly selected private forest owners in Slovenia. Forest owners were asked to rate the relevance of
nineteen factors representing information related to the social, ecological, and economic aspects of decision
making based on a five-point Likert scale. This information was consolidated into major categories with Principal
Component Analysis. Expectation maximization (EM) clustering was used to build a probabilistic private forest
owner decision making typology. Six major categories of information determined 64% of the variability in decision
making: non-wood goods and services, forest economics, property administration, optimization of wood production,
forest protection, and minimum cutting restrictions. EM clustering revealed two decision making types differing
in their attitude towards the total economic value of forests: Materialists, whose decisions are mainly related to
the extractive value of forests and Non-materialists, who manage for non-extractive value. Full-time farmers,
owners living within 2 km of their holdings, and owners who permanently cooperated with the public forest
service were much more likely to be Materialists. The uncertainty in private forest owner typology building and
the applicability of probabilistic models of private forest owners to end-users is discussed.