Effect of utilization standard on wood supply and lumber yield

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlthough sustainable forest management is accepted worldwide in concept, challenges in the methods of implementation remain. Using local data sets from Alberta, Canada, we show that a simulation approach can assist the implementation of sustainable forest management by improved understanding of product potential and other forest ecosystem goods and services that forests can provide for a given forest inventory. This will assist facilitating trade-offs among them for an optimal wood utilization strategy to achieve sustainable forest management. In this example, effects of wood utilization standard on merchantable volume, lumber volume, and number of trees that can produce at least one piece of lumber are quantified, and a conversion method for wood volumes under different wood utilization standards is presented. Wood utilization standard is the combination of stump height and diameter inside bark at merchantable height, which considerably influences available volume quantity of forest resource. However, such influences have not been quantified for sustainable forest management implementation. Our results not only confirmed that merchantable and lumber volumes increased with decreasing stump height and diameter inside bark at merchantable height, but also revealed that this trend will not hold when diameter inside bark at merchantable height is less than 7 cm.