This law, which in the main is still in force, distinguishes between ban forests and protective forests. The former are such as require in their management consideration of their protective value to adjoining private or State property and personal safety, e.g., to prevent landslides, snowslides, avalanches, etc. Protection forests are specially located forests which for their own continuance as well as for that of neighboring ones must be managed under special restrictions, e.g., on sand dunes, shores of waters, steep slopes. The dangers which they are to prevent being more of an indirect or hidden nature, and only produced by their mismanagement, the control also is of a more general nature, the owner being allowed to manage his property within general prescriptions, while the ban forests are protective forests of a higher order and are more strictly and more directly controlled by the authorities. The declaration of a ban forest and the prescription for the conservative management depend on the findings of a commission assisted by experts (since 1873).
The execution of the law however, being left to the political administration of the provinces, jealousies between imperial and provincial governments, and fear of resistance and ill will of forest owners prevented a strict and uniform application of the law. Hence, from time to time, we find ministerial rescripts, and special provincial legislation to secure a more energetic enforcement of the law.
At first, the reform had reference mainly to the Alp districts, which had suffered the most, and, in Tyrol, at least, an organization was created in 1856 which was to manage the State forests, supervise the management of corporation forests and exercise the forest police. Not until the years 1871-74, however, was a similar service extended to other portions of the empire, but at the end of that period the entire empire had been placed under the administration of a “forest protective service.” an organization quite distinct from the State forest administration.
In 1900, there were placed under this service nearly two million acres of protective, and somewhat over 150,000 acres of ban forests, but some 5 to 6 million acres of private or communal forest was under some other restrictive policy.
