Abstract
Forest management situations are intrinsically challenging due to the nature of being an interconnected and multi-faceted problem. Integrating ecological, social, and economic objectives is one of the biggest hurdles for forest planners. Often, decisions made with the interest of producing a specific ecosystem service may affect the production of other forest ecosystem services. We present a forest management scheduling model that involves multiple ownerships and addresses the joint production of two ecosystem services: timber and upland hardwood old forest. We use a marginal value approach to evaluate old forest. We analyze the impacts of considering different management options, shapes and levels of marginal value functions for old forest, and potential benefits of rewarding the major forest land ownership groups to produce old forest. Results show the downward-sloping marginal value function as a compromise strategy and the benefits of applying it over approaches using either fixed values or targets for addressing ecosystem services. A decomposition model was useful for recognizing important stand-level detail. A broad landscape and multiple ownership approach helped identify interconnections between forest cover types and between landowner groups.
Highlights
Forest management situations are typically complex, multi-faceted problems
It decomposes the formulation into subproblems that are each linked to the master problem studies emphasizing timber based economic development [41,42] to USDA National Forest planning emphasizing spatial arrangement of the forest for wildlife habitat [43,44,45,46]
To help better understand trade-offs between the joint production of the two ecosystem services, timber and old forest, we developed a series of alternatives in which hardwood old forest is valued differently
Summary
Forest management situations are typically complex, multi-faceted problems. Decisions often must be made to incorporate broad landscape level objectives such as wildlife population needs, forest health, and sustainable harvest; it is important to recognize stand-level details such as soil conditions, mixed tree species and/or ages, or operability (Figure 1). Dualplan is a forest management scheduling model developed initially over 30 years ago [34]. Over time it has been substantially updated with diverse features and modules that give the model. It decomposes the formulation into subproblems that are each linked to the master problem studies emphasizing timber based economic development [41,42] to USDA National Forest planning emphasizing spatial arrangement of the forest for wildlife habitat [43,44,45,46]. Dualplan uses a Model II linear programming formulation [47] to define the forest planning problem. It decomposes the formulation into subproblems that are each linked to the master problem via the dual variables associated with the forest-level constraints of the master problem
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