Operational Research Techniques Used for Addressing Biodiversity Objectives into Forest Management: An Overview

Marta Ezquerro,Luis Diaz-Balteiro,Marta Pardos

doi:10.3390/f7100229

Abstract

The integration of biodiversity into forest management has traditionally been a challenge for many researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we have provided a survey of forest management papers that use different Operations Research (OR) methods in order to integrate biodiversity objectives into their planning models. One hundred and seventy-nine references appearing in the ISI Web of Science database in the last 30 years have been categorized and evaluated according to different attributes like model components, forest management elements, or biodiversity issues. The results show that many OR methods have been applied to deal with this challenging objective. Thus, up to 18 OR techniques, divided into four large groups, which have been employed in four or more articles, have been identified. However, it has been observed how the evolution of these papers in time apparently tended to increase only until 2008. Finally, two clear trends in this set of papers should be highlighted: the incorporation of spatial analysis tools into these operational research models and, second, the setting up of hybrid models, which combine different techniques to solve this type of problem.

Highlights

Forest management objectives have undoubtedly evolved during the last decades and new criteria associated with goods and services with no market price have been incorporated
One of the most popular ones is Simulated Annealing (SA), while other metaheuristics techniques often applied to forest management problems are Tabu Search (TS), Genetic Algorithms (GA), and a Heuristic optimization method developed for tactical forest planning (HERO)
Given that in one paper various methodologies may have been used, the sum of all the papers employing each methodology obviously exceeds the number of papers considered (179)

Summary

Introduction

Forest management objectives have undoubtedly evolved during the last decades and new criteria associated with goods and services with no market price (e.g., biodiversity conservation) have been incorporated. In some classic studies on forest management, biodiversity conservation was not included as a forest planning objective. The gradual incorporation of these new objectives (biodiversity, sustainability, watershed protection, etc.) has increased the complexity of forest management since, according to some authors, the spatial component should be included in the forest plans [6]. A situation in which the time component was the leading decision of forest management from a strategic point of view (when to cut) has changed to another in which it is not so important when or how much should be cut, but where and how the final cuts are done

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion