Abstract

Today’s forestry faces a complex situation where one must consider not only economic profit but also non-marketed values such as biological diversity, recreation and aesthetics. This thesis presents a new method to help answer the question: How should we manage a stand or a forest in order to meet some stated objective? This objective may include a variety of values. The values dealt with in this thesis are related to economic efficiency and biological diversity, but other values that can be described numerically, directly or indirectly, and integrated into a growth-and-yield model could be considered as well.
The thesis is comprised of four papers. The first, which deals with even-aged management, develops and analyses a solution method for stand-level planning that incorporates concerns for biological diversity. The model is based on Tabu search and greedy heuristics in conjunction with a single-tree growth-and-yield model. This solution method is used again to deal with uneven-aged management in the second paper. The third paper shows that computational efficiency can be improved considerably by a proper choice of decision variables, simplification of the solution procedure and data aggregation. The last paper describes a column generation procedure that integrates stand-level optimisation into a forest-level planning problem.
​​​​​​​The stand-level planning model presented enables analysis of a wide range of objectives and constraints. The model is suggested as an analysis framework for deriving managerial guidelines or as a generator of stand-level plans in forestlevel planning. Economically efficient measures can be found to preserve or create stand structures and elements that are associated with an increased biological diversity. Indirectly, such measures can be related to a monetary cost by comparison with a case that has a purely economic objective.

Keywords

optimisation; biodiversity; coarse woody debris; deciduous,individual-tree; Picea abies; Pinus sylvestris; tree retention; tree size diversity

Published in

Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae. Silvestria
2000, number: 167
ISBN: 91-576-6051-4
Publisher: Department of Forest Resource Management and Geomatics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU Authors

• Wikström, Peder

  • Department of Forest Resource Management and Geomatics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/107968