This thesis describes research on the use of a genetic algorithm (GA) to prescribe treatment plans for forest management at the stand level. Forest management refers to making decisions about when and where to intervene in the natural growth of forests to achieve objectives, such as enhancing the visual quality of a stand or maximizing timber yield. A prescription is a schedule of thinning trea...

Regeneration and forest durability guarantee is one of the most important aspects of forest sustainability and it should be placed in forest plans priority. To compare regeneration in the two grazed and non-grazed forest, Baghe-shady forest located in Khatam city (it has the preservative regions that they are 20 years old), Yazd province, Central of Iran was selected. For this purpose, 60 sampl...

— Joint Forest Management (JFM) has succeeded in halting forest degradation in India, but its poverty reduction objective has not fully been evaluated previously. This paper compares JFM forests and government-managed forests to assess their respective net social benefits to different groups of local villagers. It shows that the JFM regime reflects the social preference of the rural nonpoor, an...

Acorn production by oaks (Quercus spp.) is an important food resource for wildlife in many deciduous forests. Its role as a hard mast crop that can be either stored or used to build fat reserves for winter survival cannot be replaced by most other potential foods. Changes in forest management, introduced pests and pathogens, and increased deer populations have resulted in significant changes in...

The reality of protected area management is that enforcing forest and park boundaries is costly and so most likely incomplete, due in part to the pressures exerted on the boundaries by local people who often have traditionally relied on the park resources. Buffer zones are increasingly being proposed and implemented to protect both forest resources and livelihoods. Developing a spatially-explic...

On a previously-digitized map, a series of 685 points were screen-digitized so as to represent major spatial features of each polygon composing 17 forest types having inherently uncertain boundaries; three forest types having precise boundaries were treated as such. From these points and three exact types, surfaces were generated which provided weights of the certainty of having each of the 20 ...

Current landslide hazard analysis does a poor job of informing the planning process for forest operations in that landslide models provide maps of landslide hazard instead of quantitative measure of landslide impact. Other aspects of forest management planning (such as road surface erosion) provide quantifiable estimates of impacts such as tons of sediment delivered to the stream. This paper ou...

Regeneration and forest durability guarantee is one of the most important aspects of forest sustainability and it should be placed in forest plans priority. To compare regeneration in the two grazed and non-grazed forest, Baghe-shady forest located in Khatam city (it has the preservative regions that they are 20 years old), Yazd province, Central of Iran was selected. For this purpose, 60 sampl...

Decision making for forest ecosystem management can include the use of a wide variety of modeling tools. These tools include vegetation growth models, wildlife models, silvicultural models, GIS, and visualization tools. NED-2 is a robust, intelligent, goal-driven decision support system that integrates tools in each of these categories. NED-2 uses a blackboard architecture and a set of semiauto...

Studies conducted after the marketing authorisation with the objective of identification, characterization or quantification of one or more risks (called PASS "Post-Authorisation Safety Studies"), have been strengthened in the past years with the implementation of the concept of risk management plans (RMPs), established in 2005 in the European regulatory framework and recently amended as part o...