Abstract
Developing a plan of action for the future use of forest resources requires a way to predict the development of the forest through time. These predictions require the use of inventory data and growth models that contain a large number of uncertainties. These uncertainties impact the quality of the predictions, and if not accounted for, they can lead to the selection of a suboptimal management plan. To account for and manage the uncertainties and associated risk, we have explored the use of stochastic programming. Stochastic programming can integrate uncertainty into the optimization process by solving the problem for a large number of potential scenarios of the forests future development. The selection of an appropriately sized set of scenarios involves a trade-off between tractability issues and problem representation issues. In this paper, an analysis of the trade-offs is conducted. Two cases are studied, one in which only the uncertainty of the inventory data is included and a second in which both growth model and inventory data uncertainties are included. The impact of increasing the number of scenarios on the problem representation is examined through a simple even-flow problem.
Highlights
In forest management, the development of high-quality plans requires detailed knowledge regarding the current situation of the forest holding, the ability to forecast the development of the holding, and the preferences of the stakeholders that may be included in the decision-making process
Determining how many scenarios are required to deterministically approximate the stochastic forest management problem depends on several key factors: the amount of uncertainty integrated into the problem, the risk preferences of the decision maker, and the acceptability threshold of the decision maker for an optimality gap
Only the inventory error and growth model errors were included in the analysis
Summary
In forest management, the development of high-quality plans requires detailed knowledge regarding the current situation of the forest holding, the ability to forecast the development of the holding, and the preferences of the stakeholders that may be included in the decision-making process. In forest management planning, these decisions could be the timing of a harvest or thinning, the planting, seeding, or natural regeneration of a stand, or silvicultural treatments to promote the establishment and growth of a stand. These management actions are applied to a potential future forest holding, predicted using growth models (for an example of the Finnish context for stand-level models, see Vuokila and Väliaho (1980), Mielikäinen (1985), and Huuskonen and Miina (2007); for treelevel models, see Hynynen et al (2002)).
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