Frederick W. Cubbage

Ecological and economic effects of forest landscape structure and rotation length: simulation studies using ECOLECON

ECOLECON is a spatially-explicit, object-oriented computer simulation model that simulates animal population dynamics and economic yield from timber harvests based on forest landscape structure and timber management schemes. The model has been parameterized to simulate the population dynamics and extinction probability of Bachmans Sparrow (Aimophila aestivalis), a species of management concern in southeastern pine forests. Simulations with ECOLECON have shown that forest landscape structure and management options such as rotation lengths influence both population sizes of the sparrows and economic returns from timber harvests. Sparrow population size and economic income were often maximized by different management strategies. For example, land expectation value reached a maximum when a rotation length was 20 years; however, whenever harvest rotation length was shorter than 80 years, sparrow population size had a negative linear relationship with rotation lengths. As the amount of mature pine habitat increased, sparrow population size increased, but annual net income decreased. Fragmentation of landscapes with only a small amount of mature habitat caused lower population sizes, but fragmentation of landscapes with a large amount of mature habitat resulted in a larger population size. Differences in placement of the mature habitat within the landscapes resulted in large differences in population size. Larger stand sizes produced higher economic revenues, but the effect of stand size on population size was confounded by the amount of mature habitat. Simulation models such as ECOLECON provide a potentially powerful tool for balancing wildlife population needs and economic revenues through designing and managing forested landscapes.

Southern pulpwood harvesting productivity and cost changes between 1979 and 1987.

The Southern U.S. pulpwood harvesting industry experienced substantial changes in productivity and logging costs from 1979 to 1987. The research measures physical and economic changes in southern timber harvesting and the degree of industry shifting between different levels of harvesting mechanization.

Implementation of the U.S. Legal, Institutional, and Economic Criterion and Indicators for the 2010 Montreal Process for Sustainable Forest Management

At the 1992 United Nations “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, most of the countries in the world, including the United States, agreed to international accords to protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change. However, they could not agree on a convention for forests, because developing countries wanted to preserve their autonomy and sovereign control of their forest resources, and developed countries would not guarantee them financial support to protect their forests (Humpheys 2006). This failure eventually led to the development of multi-lateral forest agreements and treaties to at least measure and monitor forest sustainability through Sustainable Forest Management Criteria and Indicators (SFM CI similarly, the development of forest certification systems were a non-state market driven response (Cashore et al. 2004). SFM C&I processes have since been developed to measure and monitor various conditions of forest sustainability at the national or regional level. Forest certification, on the other hand, was developed to also measure SFM, but at the forest management unit level. Many efforts have been made to harmonize national-level SFM C&I with national forest certification efforts, particularly in Europe. These various efforts at measuring, monitoring, and encouraging SFM address biophysical, economic, and social aspects of forest systems. Many of the C&I efforts have made considerable progress at tracking biophysical characteristics of forests, but the measurement and monitoring of legal and institutional features has developed more slowly. Furthermore, determining whether we are achieving SFM, in general, and if our laws and institutions are helping, in particular, is difficult to ascertain. In this book chapter, we discuss the development of one criterion of SFM C&I in the United States—the Legal, Institutional, and Economic Criterion and Indicators for the 2010 Montreal Process for Sustainable Forest Management (Criterion 7). This criterion has the