The overall research question addresses the effectiveness of incentive mechanisms in policies enhancing private forest owners' biodiversity protection. In particular, the project focuses on the link between forest owners' motivations, incentives, and institutions and questions the incentives of the current biodiversity protection policies. Our hypothesis is that the purely monetary nature of the incentives can cause a "crowding out effect", i.e. forest owners may reduce their voluntary contribution to biodiversity protection that is driven by pro-social motivations (altruism, self-image, etc.). On this background as well as knowledge obtained in this project about forest owners' motivations, we are searching for combinations of "incentive mechanisms” (monetary and non-monetary) and “institutions” (national and local authorities, NGOs etc) which are most effective in making forest owners adopting biodiversity protection measures in their forests.