A Simplified Approach to Forest Decision Support

Forest management decisions, because of the many conflicting issues involved, require many iterations to arrive at a feasible plan. Various optimization methods have been attempted to automate this process, but none have been widely accepted. A flight simulator’prototype has been developed, based on the exchange of ‘scenarios ', the current or proposed state of the forest. This simple approach produces a good feedback loop: the manager proposes a plan, and this is evaluatedfor various criteria. He may then modify his plan to improve various indices and re-submit it. Instead of having a single scenario generated as input, we will often need to generate a sequence of interventions that conform as far as possible to our economic criteria. An example of this is the evaluation of varying road construction schedules, where a particular annual budget must be assigned to the most appropriate road segment. However; it is not feasible to develop automatic systems for such plans, as there are too many other factors, such as terrain traficability, that are not yet capable of being removed from the realm of human judgement. Thus any such tools must then allow manual modification, followed by a furtlzer evaluation step.