Donald L. Grebner

Two Views of the Impact of Strong Wind Events on Forests of the Southern United States

An Internet-based survey was administered to understand whether there were differences in perception among Georgia and Mississippi registered foresters with regard to environmental factors leading to forest damage during strong wind events. The perception among both groups was that recent management activity, forest density, and recent weather activity are the most important factors for pine plantations and natural pine forests. These factors, and soil conditions, were perceived important for upland and bottomland hardwood forests. Significant differences in perception among the two groups were found, particularly with regard to the proximity of forests to openings or wetlands, which may be reflective of different experiences dealing with the consequences of severe storms, or reflective of differences in topography, tree species, or soil conditions between the states. Our study indicates that the level of importance the registered foresters place on factors leading to forest damage may differ from results of site-specific research studies.

Valuing and Characterizing Forest Conditions

When conducting management activities across a forest and over a lengthy period of time, managers must understand and quantitatively and qualitatively measure what they expect the future forest to become. In addition, they should evaluate the trade-offs they might experience when they choose one course of action over another. There are a number of common methods for evaluating present and future conditions of a forest. Forest managers can use biological measures, such as basal area, average diameter, average height, mean annual increment, trees per unit area, snags, and tree volume to evaluate the physical structure of an existing or future forest. Forest managers can also use financial criteria such as benefit/cost ratio, equal annual equivalent, net present value, and soil expectation value to evaluate the trade-offs of different actions on a forest. Changes in societal values have forced many natural resource managers to consider how their management activities affect wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, water resources, air quality, employment, and community stability. Incorporating many of these quantitative and qualitative measures into a forest plan analysis will help forest managers evaluate trade-offs and help them communicate the impact of their forest management plans to private and public landowners.

Forest and Natural Resource Sustainability

What may seem like one of the hottest topics in natural resource management today actually has been at the forefront of our profession for at least three centuries, only the form of the debate has evolved. From concerns over timber depletion arose the concept of maintaining a stable timber supply through appropriate forest planning and management techniques. As our understanding of other resources grew, the concept of sustainability shifted from commercial products to multiple resource values, then to ecosystems. From one or more perspectives, all of the sustainability concepts are valid and all continue to be used today. Ultimately, the application of sustainability concepts in forest management planning varies by landowner, geographic region, socioeconomic pressure, and resource condition.

Optimization of Tree- and Stand-Level Objectives

There are at least four physical levels of forest management and planning where decisions must be made: at the tree-level, the stand-level, the forest-level, and the landscape level. With each level, the management issues grow in size and scope, and decisions made at each level may be interconnected as well. However, tree-level decisions and stand-level decisions are not necessarily complementary; neither are stand-level decisions and forest-level decisions. This chapter concerns tree- and stand-level decisions and how a landowner may want to maximize the volume or value produced from a tree or a stand. Forest-level decisions are considered in forthcoming chapters. These typically are developed for one landowner or organization. Landscape plans can involve multiple landowners or organizations. Optimal plans of action are those where the schedule of activities will best meet the objectives of the landowner within the scope of their perceived physical level of forest management. Of course, a number of constraints may guide the development of an optimal plan. In an effort to use resources wisely, we need to understand how to develop guidelines for field implementation of activities, and an optimal solution to a management problem is a reasonable starting point. In addition, landowners not only may want to understand the best course of action for the management of their land, but also to compare the optimal plan to several alternatives in an effort to understand the associated trade-offs.

Forest Supply Chain Management

Supply chains are integrated networks composed of raw material suppliers, manufacturing facilities, and transportation providers that work across organizational boundaries to deliver products to customers. We could view supply chains from a traditional wood products perspective, or from a multiple-use perspective. In the forestry supply chain, some of these functions are performed by the landowner, who supplies the raw materials, and the harvesting contractor, who commonly performs two functions: manufacturing a tree into logs and transporting the logs from the forest to the roadside or landing. Hauling contractors then transport the products from the roadside to various processing facilities. Various types of mills subsequently convert the logs into wood, paper, and chemical products. Finally, the finished products are transported to the customers or end-users. Many aspects of the integrated nature of the forestry supply chain may be recognized in strategic, tactical, and operational forest management plans. They often involve advanced planning techniques, have spatial restrictions, and utilize hierarchical programming to solve these problems.

Graphical Solution Techniques for Two-Variable Linear Problems

Stand-level optimization frequently is used to develop plans of action for many landowners who have small holdings, however when a broader forest- or landscape-level perspective is considered, a trade-off may be required on stand-level decisions. Much of the remainder of this book addresses these broader considerations and the associated planning problems. In addition, we will present a number of methods for addressing forest- or landscape-level goals, as they may be used in conjunction with optimal stand-level decisions. As an introduction to broader-scale issues in forest management and planning, this chapter’s goal is to enhance problem-solving and critical-thinking skills in students enrolled in natural resource management programs. Students may have been exposed to word problems in their elementary education days, but a review of them in relation to natural resource management may be a necessary precursor to the concepts that follow in the next few chapters of this book. Viewing the solutions to natural resource management problems as graphs could help us understand the concepts related to the solution space, optimality, feasibility, and efficiency. Management problems are described in this chapter in two dimensions, hence the use of two variables, to facilitate the visualization of solutions.

Scenario Analysis in Support of Strategic Planning

Scenario analysis consists of a set of techniques that can be used in association with a strategic planning process to acknowledge uncertainties and potential volatile socio-economic environments. Scenario analysis does this by assisting with the development of alternative plausible futures that are ultimately expressed as stories or narratives. The scenarios serve two main purposes, one is to continually refine expectations of the future with respect to consistencies among the relationships, and the other is to offer a value-free forum for which ideas concerning the future can be shared within an organization. Scenario analysis is not a replacement for the mathematical processes described earlier in this book, but a complement to those processes.

Management of Forests and Other Natural Resources

Quantitative and qualitative methods are necessary for helping land managers and landowners understand the choices they must make from among many competing alternatives. The results of planning processes help guide the activities of land managers, and allow land managers and landowners to develop and evaluate how various alternatives may meet their objectives. This book concerns the theory, methods, applications, and issues related to forest management and planning, and presents to its readers numerous methods for both assessing the current and future state of the resources, and for determining the best management alternatives available. Some traditional quantitative planning methods, such as linear programming, are presented and continue to be used today by both public and private organizations with increasing frequencies. An overview of other more advanced methods are provided as well. This book also provides coverage of conventional and contemporary issues in natural resource management that influence planning processes, such as forest sustainability, forest certification, and wood supply chain management. In this introductory chapter, we present an overview of forest planning, one of the most extensively studied and most complex issues in natural resource management. In describing the forest planning environment, a brief summary of the various types of plans one might encounter—and the basic types of group decision-making processes—are presented along with a discussion of a few of the challenges facing forest management and planning.

Spatial Restrictions and Considerations in Forest Planning

Previous chapters have addressed classical issues in forest management planning that demonstrated the uses of formulae methods and linear programming to determine harvest levels. This chapter introduces several contemporary planning concerns that involve the spatial relationship between forest management activities and resource-related goals. Controlling the timing, extent, and location of forest management activities can require positional information describing the landscape features being managed; information perhaps best derived from geographic information systems. Spatial considerations in forest plans can include constraints related to the adjacency, connectivity, and proximity of management activities, or can include objectives that either maximize or minimize some spatial aspect of a plan. In the former case, adjacency and green-up rules are common examples of spatial constraints that have been examined in North America, Australia, and Europe. In the latter case, you may want to develop a plan that maximizes the habitat quality for a species of wildlife, using a set of rules that include quantifying the spatial relationship between foraging and nesting areas, for example. In the case of habitat quality, the functional relationships either could be included in the objective function, resulting in perhaps a multiobjective problem, or they could stand alone, leaving ecological and commodity production goals to be represented by constraints (minimum or maximum levels of achievement). The application of these types of restrictions in forest planning are discussed in this chapter, and although a number of mathematical processes have been developed over the last 30 years to address these restrictions, the focus is on the spatial relationships themselves, and how we might incorporate them into a forest planning process.

Geographic Information and Land Classification in Support of Forest Planning

Maps and associated statistics have long been used to facilitate forest planning and management activities. Spatial information provides a context for physically locating management activities and assessing their impact on natural resource conditions. The ability to extract data that addresses a number of management-related questions is relatively easy with a modern geographic information systems (GIS), as compared to manually overlaying maps and sorting through hard-copy stand records. As a starting point for planning and management, most land management organizations perform some sort of land classification. Characteristics of the landscape need to be summarized in some form or fashion to support the scheduling of management activities across the landscape. The three most common types of land classifications in forest planning are the strata-based method, the stand-based method, and the stand-based method that includes spatial information. Understanding GIS data structures, the capability of GIS to manipulate spatial data, and the basic needs of planners will ultimately make communication among professionals clearer, and perhaps enable work processes to function more efficiently.