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Land tenure heterogeneity may be an obstacle to forested landscape-level management planning and the provision of ecosystem services. This research focused on the potential of combining participatory workshops and multiple criteria decision methods (MCDMs) to support the development and negotiation of targets for the supply of ecosystem services and help design the management plan needed to meet those targets. We describe an application to two forested landscapes with several ownership types in Portugal. The approach encompassed the design of two workshops involving more than 40 stakeholders (forests owners, the forest service, the forest industry, local municipalities and other nongovernmental organizations). The list of ecosystem services included carbon stocks, cork, pine cones, and forest inventory at the end of the planning horizon as well as volume flows from a range of forest species. Results demonstrated the potential of MCDM tools to help individual forest stakeholders set and adjust ecosystem services target levels. They further demonstrated the potential of MCDMs to facilitate the negotiation of these targets by the stakeholders and the reaching of meaningful solutions. Finally, they demonstrated that these tools provide valuable information to combine the negotiations of both targets and behaviors and programs needed to attain them.

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Abstract. Heuristics have been used extensively to support forest management scheduling in the last two decades. The need for spatial definition, and the combined shortcomings of available technology and traditional mathematical programming approaches, sparked interest in alternative forest management scheduling techniques in the early 1980s. Concerns with the environmental impacts of forest management options further encouraged the development of heuristics to address adjacency relationships in harvesting decisions. More recently, heuristics have been used to target other multi-objective management issues. Namely, they have been used to provide information to help sustain both traditional forest products flows (e.g. timber and cork) and landscape structural characteristics (e.g., mosaic elements such as patch number and size, amounts of edge or interior space). In this chapter, we describe the current state of the art of heuristic application in forest management scheduling. Heuristic approaches are presented and discussed in the framework of forest management scheduling needs. Results from some heuristic research efforts are used to outline the application potential and shortcomings of these techniques.

Analysis of the performance of different implementations of a heuristic method to optimize forest harvest scheduling. Silva Fennica vol. 49 no. 4 article id 1326. 18 p. Highlights • The number of treatment schedules available for each stand has an impact on the optimal configuration of opt-moves (i.e. number stands where the treatment schedule is changed in an iteration). • Considering a large number of treatment schedules per stand, the one-opt move implementation is preferred, yet when considering a low number of decision choices the two-opt moves option performs better.

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Forest and fire management planning activities are carried out mostly independently of each other. This paper discusses research aiming at the development of methods and tools that can be used for enhanced integration of forest and fire management planning activities. Specifically, fire damage models were developed for Eucalyptus globulus Labill stands in Portugal. Models are based on easily measurable forest characteristics so that forest managers may predict post-fire mortality based on forest structure. For this purpose, biometric data and fire-damage descriptors from 2005/2006 National Forest Inventory plots and other sample plots within 2006, 2007 and 2008 fire areas were used. A three-step modelling strategy based on logistic regression methods was used. In the first step, a model was developed to predict whether mortality occurs after a wildfire in a eucalypt stand. In the second step the degree of damage caused by wildfires in stands where mortality occurs is quantified (i.e. percentage of mortality). In the third step this mortality is distributed among trees. Data from over 85 plots and 1648 trees were used for modeling purposes. The damage models show that relative damage increases with stand basal area. Tree level mortality models indicate that trees with high diameters, in dominant positions and located in regular stands are less prone to die when a wildfire occurs.