The increasing demand for wood resources is putting significant pressure on forestecosystems, reducing their size and health. Sweden, with its extensive forests, has usedintensive forestry practices focused on clear-cutting and replanting to boost timberproduction. While this has made Sweden a top timber exporter, it has also resulted inyoung, monocultural forests with less structural complexity compared to diverse borealforests elsewhere. The current Swedish forest strategy aims to regenerate habitat forbiodiversity, however, it is determined to not be enough since the measures are based on“freedom with responsibility” whereas nature conservation is based on voluntarymeasures and falls short in desired conservation outcomes.This study aims to understand the local perspective of individual forest owners inÖstergötland, Sweden by interviewing six individual forest owners. This is due to themajority of forest owners in Östergötland being individual forest owners and due toÖstergötland being one of the biggest forestry-conducting counties in Sweden.Understanding the perspective of local individual forest owners can develop anunderstanding of the dynamics between social and ecological systems in that particularcontext and the barriers associated with stimulating biodiversity. The local context isessential to understand the prerequisites and possible solutions to the problem.This thesis adopts Social-Ecological Systems Theory (SES) which is an approach thataims to understand and analyze the dynamics and interconnectedness between social andecological systems. SES emphasizes the dynamic interactions and feedback loopsbetween human activities and the environment, recognizing that changes in one systemcan have significant impacts on the other. This thesis aims to understand the dynamicsbetween social and ecological systems in Östergötland, Sweden. The purpose is also tofind barriers that hamper the stimulation of biodiversity by interviewing individual forestowners who own forests in the county of Östergötland.In total six themes were used as a basis for the analysis, these are referred to as socialsystems. The results show that social systems such as resource use practices, governancesystems, community resilience, perceptions of nature, knowledge systems and economyaffect ecological systems in the forests of Östergötland. Each of these systems affectsecological systems in different ways, and they often interact with each other to produce acumulative effect. For example, the way in which people perceive nature can impact howthey manage it, and how they manage it can, in turn, affect the ecosystem or dependingon how financial contributions and governmental involvement are constructed it willlikely affect to what extent you save the forest for nature conservation purposes. Withineach theme, barriers that hamper the stimulation of biodiversity were identified. Thefindings are discussed and critically reviewed in the discussion section.