Forest Planning Research Articles

Adoption of Digital Aerial Photogrammetry in Forest Planning: A Case Study of Canavese Forestry Consortium, NW Italy with Technical and Economic Issues

The forestry sector has been significantly affected by the recent advances in geomatics. Photogrammetric aerial acquisitions provide full coverage of forests, making possible a wall-to-wall mapping of the main forestry key variables, such as tree height and tree density, needed for forest planning and management purposes. This work summarizes the role that digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) is expected to have in the forest planning context and analyzes the main products from DAP that are significantly required. According to their technical features, some strategies are proposed to program acquisitions in order to consciously set operational parameters needed for obtaining accuracy of measures compliant with forest planning requirements. Admitting that, in most cases, forest planners externalize DAP acquisitions to flying companies, the authors propose simple strategies for making an ex-post evaluation of flight conditions through a conscious processing of the external orientation parameters of images resulting after the bundle adjustment. Theoretical aspects are exemplified with reference to a practical case study relying on an aerial acquisition that, in 2019, the Canavese Forestry Consortium (NW Italy) made to support the ongoing redaction of its new forest plans. Finally, some economic concerns are presented to demonstrate the capability of this technique to absorb the most of costs associated with ground surveys, especially when large areas have to be investigated. In particular, about 66% of cost savings were found when comparing DAP-based forest mapping to traditional forest inventory strategies.

Getting Flow: The Place of Production Forests in the Rise of Mountain Biking

Mountain biking has increased in popularity in many countries over recent decades. Production forests provide not only an outstanding space for mountain bike riding, but also specific characteristics conducive to purpose-built track building. With recreational access to production forests, managers must balance commercial operations and industry environmental obligations with the interests and actions of riders. Production forests in New Zealand have accommodated mountain biking activities for decades. The trend from 1991 to 2022 showed overall increasing opportunities for mountain biking in production forests, particularly in smaller commercial peri-urban plantations and forest parks maintained as dedicated mountain bike parks. Over the same period, public mountain biking access to larger (>1500 ha) forests peaked in 2008. These recreational changes within forests, and the impact these changes have pressed onto forest managers, have not been well documented. This paper explores the rise in popularity of mountain biking in New Zealand’s production plantation forests, and the response of forest owners and managers to increased mountain biking activities in their commercial forest estates. The paper discusses implications for forest planning to accommodate active recreational sports such as mountain biking in production forests, suggesting policies and procedures to help protect commercial interests and forest ecology, while allowing for a contemporary mix of recreational activities.

Evaluation of mushroom production potential by combining spatial optimization and LiDAR-based forest mapping data

High-resolution forest mapping technology is a powerful data source to assess the production capacity of forests regarding wood and non-wood ecosystem services. The study shows how to evaluate the potential benefits from forest management treatments devoted to increase mushroom supply. The study was developed in Central Spain, over a forest with important cultural and economic values attached to mushrooms. Airborne laser scanning (ALS), mushroom production models and mathematical programming as spatial optimization method are used to sequence, spatially and temporally, silviculture-oriented actions to enlarge mushroom provisioning. We present a tactical forest planning solution to incentivize mushroom yield driven by clustered silvicultural treatments applied to fine-grained segments derived from ALS data, and along a 5-year plan while embedding temporal and spatial dependencies. Mushroom yield can increase up to 18 % from current conditions if all area is treated. Our model integrates constraints to optimize the selection of segments yielding the highest benefits in terms of mushroom yield and timber removals during the treatments. The temporal sequencing was successful, so the annual interventions are scheduled aligned in space and in time to ease the actionability and realism of model outputs. The assessment of production potential is an informative, spatially and temporally explicit exercise to inform decision-makers on investment opportunities to enhance the supply of non-wood ecosystem services, tested with mushroom in this study but extendable to more non-wood ecosystem services.

Improving dynamic treatment unit forest planning with cellular automata heuristics

We present a model for conducting dynamic treatment unit (DTU) forest planning using a heuristic cellular automata (CA) approach. The clustering of DTUs is driven by entry costs associated with treatments, thus we directly model the economic incentive to cluster. The model is based on the work presented in the literature but enhanced by adding a third phase to the CA algorithm where DTUs are mapped in high detail. The model allows separate but nearby forest areas to be included in the same DTU and shares the entry cost if they are within a defined distance. The model is applied to a typical long-term forest planning problem for a 1 182 ha landscape in northern Sweden, represented by 4 218 microsegments with an average size of 0.28 ha. The added phase increased the utility by 1.5–32.2%. The model produced consistent solutions—more than half of all microsegments were managed with the same treatment program in 95% of all solutions when multiple solutions were found.

Handling uncertainties in forest information: the hierarchical forest planning process and its use of information at large forest companies

AbstractThis qualitative study aimed to map what information is used in the forest planning process at large forest-owning companies, how it is used, its level of uncertainty and currently employed strategies to handle forest information uncertainty. An additional aim was to assess the status of the paradigm of the forest planning hierarchy in forestry. We used data from semi-structured interviews with representatives of six large forest-owning companies in Sweden, representing 30 per cent of the productive forest land in the country. Our results show that the forest planning process is a hierarchical system of decisions where the information used in the different planning stages is of varying quality and that the traditional hierarchical planning paradigm still plays a vital role in forestry. The most central source of information in the whole forest-planning process is the forest stand database (forest inventory). This includes uncertain information from various sources, including subjective field measurements and aerial image interpretation. However, the use of remote sensing estimates to feed the databases is increasing, which will probably improve the overall quality. Another important finding is that forest companies tend not to use decision support systems or optimization models to solve planning problems outside the scope of strategic planning; thus, most planning is done manually, e.g. in a geographic information system (GIS) environment. Apart from the hierarchical division of the planning process itself, we identified six main strategies that the companies use to control information uncertainty, namely locking the future by making a decision, utilizing a surplus of available harvests, updating information before a decision is made, replanning when the plan is found to be infeasible, planning by looking back and ignoring the uncertainty, either intentionally or unintentionally. The results from this study increase our understanding of contemporary forest-planning practices and will be helpful in the development of decision support systems and methods for information collection.

Diverse stakeholders and their interests matter to the U.S. Forest Service: a network of action situations analysis of how stakeholders affect forest plan outcomes

Diverse stakeholders and their interests matter to the U.S. Forest Service: a network of action situations analysis of how stakeholders affect forest plan outcomes

The use of spatial data and satellite information in legal compliance and planning in forest management.

A key part of native forest management in designated wood production areas is identifying locations which must be exempt from logging. Forest laws, government regulations, and codes of practice specify where logging is and is not permitted. Assessing compliance with these regulations is critical but can be expensive and time consuming, especially if it entails field measurements. In some cases, spatial data products may help reduce the costs and increase the transparency of assessing compliance. However, different spatial products can vary in their accuracy and resolution, leading to uncertainty in forest management. We present the results of a detailed case study investigating the compliance of logging operations with laws preventing cutting on slopes exceeding 30°. We focused on two designated water catchments in the Australian State of Victoria which supply water to the city of Melbourne. We compared slopes that had been logged on steep terrain using spatial data based on a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) derived from LiDAR, a 1 arc second DEM derived from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, and a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) with a resolution of 10m. While our analyses revealed differences in slope measurements among the different spatial products, all three datasets (and the on-site slope measurements) estimated the occurrence of widespread logging of forests on slopes >30° in both water catchments. We found the lowest resolution Shuttle Radar Topography Mission DEM underestimated the steepness of slopes, whilst the DTM was variable in its estimates. As expected, the LiDAR generated slope calculations provided the best fit with on-site measurements. Our study demonstrates the value of spatial data products in assessing compliance with logging laws and codes of practice. We suggest that LiDAR DEMs, and DTMs also can be useful in proactive forest planning and management by helping better identify which areas should be exempt from cutting before logging operations commence.

Carbon Sequestration Model Based on Multiple Linear Regression

Proper deforestation promotes the development of man and nature, so it is necessary to design models to calculate the amount of carbon sequestered and further determine the value of forests. According to the formula for calculating the carbon sequestration of forest and its affiliated forest products, we use the intensity of human disturbance as a single variable to construct a differential equation for the relationship between forest and wood product accumulation. Combining five major indicators such as rainfall, temperature, and tree species, we constructed a multiple linear regression model for carbon sequestration using the data obtained for fifteen forests worldwide. As a result, we established the relationship between carbon sequestration and the influencing factors, learned the significant effects of tree species and artificial disturbance intensity on carbon sequestration, and further established the optimal forest plan.

Assessing forest accessibility for the multifunctional management of protected areas in Central Italy

Multifunctional forest management should provide the opportunity to create, conserve, modify or eliminate forest roads. Within protected areas, it is difficult to make a single assessment of the degree of accessibility to different forest areas, having to mediate among productive forestry, protection needs and other benefits deriving from forest stands. A GIS-based methodology, with the support of a Forest Information System (FIS) and available Forest Plans for the study area, were applied to create an accessibility map (based on the forest roads network) for the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park (PNALM). Results were related to several FIS metadata, highlighting that accessibility in the study area was sufficient, but not optimal, in the productive management units, being rather poor in those where soil protection and biodiversity conservation are the main functions (only 38.8% of them were accessible). Forest roads density (28.5 m ha−1) was not homogeneously distributed within the study area and the ratio between forest road length (199.4 km) and planned forest surface (13,355.3 ha) is only 14.9 m ha−1. In contrast to what is commonly found in forest accessibility works, the innovative element of this study was the involvement of PNALM’s technical office in evaluating the results and exploring the opportunity to adopt a different policy for forest roads network management.

Forest management plan based on carbon sequestration model

The main purpose of this question is to establish a carbon sequestration model that is the most effective in sequestering carbon dioxide to determine the carbon sequestration capacity of forests and their products. A comprehensive evaluation model was established by the entropy weight method on the basis of the three indicators that affect the carbon sequestration amount, social factors such as "residents near the forest" and social and economic benefits are introduced to determine the scope of the forest management plan. We incorporate factors such as tree age change rate and forest area change rate into the forest management plan. We also establish a multiple regression prediction model to predict the carbon sequestration amount of forests in each year, and then added up to obtain the carbon sequestration carbon amount in 100 years.

Forestry Modeling Based on Carbon Sequestration

The main problem is to develop a carbon sequestration model to determine the carbon sequestration capacity of forests and their products and then, based on this, to determine a forest management plan that is most effective in sequestration of CO2. After that, a decision model for understanding forest utilization is developed. Finally, we select Chinese forestry as the representative and present the results of a study on selective felling of temperate coniferous and mixed broad-leaved forests to promote carbon sequestration in a reasonable time interval.

A comprehensive evaluation of forest value based on carbon sequestration stock prediction

The increasing greenhouse effect globally, the excessive deforestation of forests and the weakening of forest carbon storage capacity have brought about drastic changes in the global climate and posed a great threat to the biosphere. Therefore, the issue of "making efficient use of forest carbon storage capacity and diversified value of forests" has attracted our attention. To better analyze the problem of carbon sequestration and forest value and formulate a reasonable forest management plan, this article established two models: the "grey system model" and "BP neural network prediction model." The two models used China's forest inventory data in the past 40 years to predict that the average value of total forest carbon sequestration in China in a hundred years is 189.37×108t. Aiming at the problem of forest value evaluation, this article apply "grey correlation analysis method," "main component analysis model," and "fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model." This article considers the value of forests from two aspects: ecological value and economic value. In terms of ecological value: this article found that forests have various values such as "carbon sequestration, water conservation, soil conservation, and biodiversity maintenance"; Most forests have a "U-shaped transition period" in carbon sequestration capacity. "Tree age and tree composition structure" are the main factors affecting carbon sequestration capacity. In terms of economic value, this article found that "increasing the proportion of young trees and suitable for the production of forest products" is a good way to increase the economic value of forests. In addition, the research shows that there are obvious differences in the degree of carbon sequestration capacity and economic value of forests in different climate areas such as "subtropical zone, warm temperate zone, and middle temperate zone.".

Decision Analysis of Forest Management Based on Carbon Sequestration Model

This paper to determine how much carbon dioxide a forest and its products can be expected to sequester over time, building a CASA model to calculate Net Primary Productivity (NPP) of the forest and transfer NPP to carbon sink. Then prove that harvest trees because young forests have stronger carbon sequestration capacity than old forests. Finally, determine that the most effective forest management plan at sequestering carbon dioxide is to harvest old trees and plant new trees at the optimal time provided by model.

Research on forest management based on carbon sequestration and forest-human strategy model

According to the FAO, we can see that the world's forests are large and growing. However, forest system also faces some problems. Challenged by ICM, we decided to build a model to balance carbon sequestration, forest products, biodiversity aspects, recreational uses, and cultural considerations, making improvements to existing forest management systems. Develop an optimal carbon sequestration model, and calculate how much CO2 the forest and its products can absorb. Identify a forest management plan that needs to be the most beneficial to society and to balance the various uses of the forest. We also write the specturm of the management plan, calculate the conditions under which the forest will not be deforested, and determine the transition points in the management plan.

Research on the optimal forest management strategy aiming at maximum carbon sequestration

In this paper, we use the 3-PG model to establish the relationship between time and carbon sequestration function, further analyze the relationship between forest age and carbon sequestration based on the 3-PG model, and obtain the optimal forest management strategy aiming at the maximum carbon sequestration. In addition, a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) model is established to deduce the transition points between optimal forest planning models from the mean values under different conditions. Finally, we use the 3-PG model to estimate the carbon sink values after 100 years. We refer to the 3-PG model and FCE to illustrate the necessity of moderate deforestation, which is beneficial to forest development and carbon sequestration.

Resource Communication: ForestAz - Using Google Earth Engine and Sentinel data for forest monitoring in the Azores Islands (Portugal)

Aim of study: ForestAz application was developed to (i) map Azorean forest areas accurately through semiautomatic supervised classification; (ii) assess vegetation condition (e.g., greenness and moisture) by computing and comparing several spectral indices; and (iii) quantitatively evaluate the stocks and dynamics of aboveground carbon (AGC) sequestrated by Azorean forest areas.
 Area of study: ForestAz focuses primarily on the Public Forest Perimeter of S. Miguel Island (Archipelago of the Azores, Portugal), with about 3808 hectares.
 Material and methods: ForestAz was developed with Javascript for the Google Earth Engine platform, relying solely on open satellite remote sensing data, as Copernicus Sentinel-1 (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Sentinel-2 (multispectral).
 Main results: By accurately mapping S. Miguel island forest areas using a detailed species-based vegetation mapping approach; by allowing frequent and periodic monitoring of vegetation condition; and by quantitatively assessing the stocks and dynamics of AGC by these forest areas, this remote sensing-based application may constitute a robust and low-cost operational tool able to support local/regional decision-making on forest planning and management.
 Research highlights: This collaborative initiative between the University of the Azores and the Azores Regional Authority in Forest Affairs was selected to be one of the 99 user stories by local and regional authorities described in the catalog edited by the European Commission, the Network of European Regions Using Space Technologies (NEREUS Association), and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Optimal Conversion Management for Spruce-dominated Forests: the Case of Drahanska Highlands

With climate change, restoration of natural tree species in areas planted artificially with Norway spruce (Picea abies (L). Karst.) is among the main issues in Central European forest management. However, information on particular forest conversion strategies and on understanding their economic consequences are incomplete. To contribute, we develop a deterministic finite-time dynamic optimization model to understand the driving forces in the economically optimal conversion of spruce-dominated forests planted outside of natural conditions in South Moravia, Czech Republic. In addition to the commonly researched European beech (Fagus sylvatica (L.)), we also consider oak (Quercus (sp.)), Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris (L.) Karst.), and larch (Larix decidua) as alternatives to spruce and evaluate them from an economic point of view. The model recommends a steady reduction of the spruce fraction, replacing it preferably with oak, beech, and larch. The model validation shows that such a forest plan appears both ecologically advisable and economically optimal.

A balancing act: Biodiversity and human wellbeing considerations in the management of urban forest in a global biodiversity hotspot

Environmental and urban forest managers in cities located in highly biodiverse regions may need to balance biodiversity conservation with the provision of ecosystem services to people. However, striking this balance is not easy and many competing factors influence the decision-making process. Set in the Perth Metropolitan Area, located in the global biodiversity hotspot of the Southwestern Australia Floristic Province, this study aimed to understand: (i) the extent to which a benefits-oriented approach is used by local governments to optimise biodiversity and human wellbeing urban forest outcomes, and (ii) what other factors influence the decision-making process shaping urban forest composition. Using a social-ecological framework, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 local government practitioners. We found that biodiversity conservation is actively considered in the planning and management of urban forest in natural areas and parks, but rarely in streetscapes. Maximising shade and cooling, and to a lesser extent enhancing sense of place, were the key benefits actively sought in streetscapes. Parks appeared to straddle the middle ground as areas with most flexibility to accommodate multiple biodiversity and human wellbeing benefits. Yet, benefits were only some of a multitude of social-ecological factors influencing the decision-making process shaping urban forest composition. In particular, streetscapes were affected by a large number of social and political factors (e.g., perceived risk and nuisance, ad-hoc decisions by elected members), many of them leading to suboptimal urban forest outcomes. For a benefits-oriented approach to prevail in complex and contested urban spaces it is important that the decision-making process is evidence-informed and capable of handling the challenges and conflicts that are likely to arise. Reactive decision-making results in a conservative, “safe” species palette that over time defines streetscapes by what they do not do (creating disservices) rather than what they do (delivering multiple biodiversity and wellbeing benefits), which ultimately is not a desired outcome in the context of an increasingly urbanized world.

Analyses of periodic annual increment by diameter and volume in differently aged black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) stands: Case study

Black locust is one of the most commonly planted exotic tree species in the world. It has a crucial role in mitigating the negative effects of climate change. Its increment analyses have a key role in forest planning. Increment is added to the wood stock of the forest over and over again, and only this continuous replenishment makes the sustainable forest management possible. This study presents the results of the analysis of periodic annual increment (PAI) by diameter (dbh) and volume (v) of two differently aged black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) stands, growing under similar ecological conditions. The main correlations are as follows: PAI<sub>dbh</sub> and diameter at breast height: r = 0.601 and 0.704 (P = 0.01); PAI<sub>v</sub> and mean tree volume (v): r = 0.721 and 0.849 (P = 0.01). The presented correlations clearly demonstrate the importance of individual differentiation within a stand.

SYNOPTIC REVIEW OF FORESTRY AND FOREST PRODUCTS TRADE AND PRODUCTION IN AFRICA

Aims to valuate Africa's forestry and forest products, namely Wood Forest Products (WFPs) and Non-wood Forest Products (NWFPs) in the sixteen (16) West African countries.The study identified a systematic assessment of the most common forest products (wood and non-wood forest products) considering the available data on the national forest reserves of the selected countries in West Africa. The study also revealed the need for biodiversity conservation of the available forest reserves to help mitigate the impact of global warming targeting the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 13- Climate Action. This is focused on integrating climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction, and early warning signs into the national policies, improving forest planning and management education, awareness-raising, and institutional capacity within the sub-region. Keywords: Forestry; Forest Management; Forest Products; Land-Use; West Africa.