Optimal Management of Naturally Regenerating Uneven-aged Forests
This work addresses the challenge of economically viable and ecologically sustainable management for foresters shifting to uneven-aged practices, though it is incremental in nature.
The authors tackled the problem of managing uneven-aged forests by developing an algorithm to handle a computationally tedious size-structured ecological model for spruce forests, and conducted a sensitivity analysis to understand model behavior.
A shift from even-aged forest management to uneven-aged management practices leads to a problem rather different from the existing straightforward practice that follows a rotation cycle of artificial regeneration, thinning of inferior trees and a clearcut. A lack of realistic models and methods suggesting how to manage uneven-aged stands in a way that is economically viable and ecologically sustainable creates difficulties in adopting this new management practice. To tackle this problem, we make a two-fold contribution in this paper. The first contribution is the proposal of an algorithm that is able to handle a realistic uneven-aged stand management model that is otherwise computationally tedious and intractable. The model considered in this paper is an empirically estimated size-structured ecological model for uneven-aged spruce forests. The second contribution is on the sensitivity analysis of the forest model with respect to a number of important parameters. The analysis provides us an insight into the behavior of the uneven-aged forest model.