Spatially Explicit Optimization in Forest Management and Planning

Introduction

Forest management and planning have been facing challenges of better integrating a diverse set of ecological, economic, and social objectives. Ecological objectives add complexity to forest planning in addition to the objective of maintaining long-term sustainable timber-harvesting levels. Forest management problems with ecological objectives need to consider many important spatial details related to landscape-level forest-spatial structures. Understanding how to create, protect, and enhance desired forest spatial structures is a fundamental task of strategic-level quantitative forest management and planning.

To facilitate landscape-level forest management and planning decisions, we often need to classify an entire forest, which may include hundreds to millions of acres of forested land, into small management units. Those management units are often called “stands” (e.g., each polygon in the forest in Fig. 1is a stand). Within the framework of spatially explicit forest...