Community forests in NRW and legal framework

The ownership of the forests is shared by the stockholders as an historically rooted legal framework. Due to different backgrounds in formation, there is no relation between the size of community forests and the number of stockholders.
The four cornerstones of the community forest law from 1975 are:
All stockholders are part of a public corporation, the forest cooperative
It is forbidden so dissolve forest areas which are part of a community forest
Consistent management policies for all kinds of community forests
The possibility to merge forest cooperatives or create new ones

For the creation of the community forest law in 1975, an advisory board with participants from all existing forms of community forests was formed. Because if this involvement the framework is well accepted and has proved its practicability. Since the implementation of the community forest law until 2002 only two new forest cooperatives have been founded. It is not easy to convince private forest owners to make this step

There are several advantages of community forests compared to small private forests:  
a chairman can decide for all members how to manage the forest, especially after calamities such as a storm
merger of forest cooperatives and newly founded cooperatives improve the forest ownership structure