Can mature patch constraints mitigate the fragmenting effects of harvest opening size restrictions?

Abstract

AbstractHarvest scheduling models often include maximum harvest opening size constraints, a restriction generally imposed for legal or policy reasons. The maximum harvest opening size restriction can greatly affect the spatial layout of the forest, with the dispersed harvesting increasing forest fragmentation. Because they can offset the negative impacts of maximum harvest opening size constraints, mature patch size constraints, which require a certain amount of the forest to be in patches meeting both minimum size and age requirements, have also been included in these models. This paper looks at the economic and spatial effects of ten harvest scheduling formulations with these two constraint sets on 21 hypothetical forest landscapes. Analyses of their age‐class distributions, border distributions, and patch size distributions at the end of a 60‐year planning horizon confirm that maximum harvest opening size constraints tend to fragment forest landscapes and that mature patch constraints can significantly reduce these effects.