Chapter 12 - Spatial Restrictions and Considerations in Forest Planning

Abstract

Previous chapters have addressed classical issues in forest management planning that demonstrated the uses of formulae methods and linear programming to determine harvest levels. This chapter introduces several contemporary planning concerns that involve the spatial relationship between forest management activities and resource-related goals. Controlling the timing, extent, and location of forest management activities can require positional information describing the landscape features being managed; information perhaps best derived from geographic information systems. Spatial considerations in forest plans can include constraints related to the adjacency, connectivity, and proximity of management activities, or can include objectives that either maximize or minimize some spatial aspect of a plan. In the former case, adjacency and green-up rules are common examples of spatial constraints that have been examined in North America, Australia, and Europe. In the latter case, you may want to develop a plan that maximizes the habitat quality for a species of wildlife, using a set of rules that include quantifying the spatial relationship between foraging and nesting areas, for example. In the case of habitat quality, the functional relationships either could be included in the objective function, resulting in perhaps a multiobjective problem, or they could stand alone, leaving ecological and commodity production goals to be represented by constraints (minimum or maximum levels of achievement). The application of these types of restrictions in forest planning are discussed in this chapter, and although a number of mathematical processes have been developed over the last 30 years to address these restrictions, the focus is on the spatial relationships themselves, and how we might incorporate them into a forest planning process.