Chung, W. 2002. Eight heuristic planning techniques applied to three increasingly diffi cult wildlife planning problems. Silva Fennica 36(2): 561-584.As both spatial and temporal characteristics of desired future conditions are becoming important measures of forest plan success, forest plans and forest planning goals are becoming complex. Heuristic techniques are becoming popular for developing alternative forest plans that include spatial constraints. Eight types of heuristic planning techniques were applied to three increasingly diffi cult forest planning problems where the objective function sought to maximize the amount of land in certain types of wildlife habitat. The goal of this research was to understand the relative challenges and opportunities each technique presents when more complex diffi cult goals are desired. The eight heuristic techniques were random search, simulated annealing, great deluge, threshold accepting, tabu search with 1-opt moves, tabu search with 1-opt and 2-opt moves, genetic algorithm, and a hybrid tabu search / genetic algorithm search process. While our results should not be viewed as universal truths, we determined that for the problems we examined, there were three classes of techniques: very good (simulated annealing, threshold accepting, great deluge, tabu search with 1-opt and 2-opt moves, and tabu search / genetic algorithm), adequate (tabu search with 1-opt moves, genetic algorithm), and less than adequate (random search). The relative advantages in terms of solution time and complexity of programming code are discussed and should provide planners and researchers a guide to help match the appropriate technique to their planning problem. The hypothetical landscape model used to evaluate the techniques can also be used by others to further compare their techniques to the ones described here.

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Forest roads are a necessary element for accessing forestry resources, but their impact on the environment can be significant. Forest roads can cause a variety of impacts on local wildlife that may lead to extirpation: facilitating the spread of invasive organisms, causing death or harm by vehicle strikes, and changing the behavior of animals to their detriment. Roads create improved access to forests, which can increase predation rates from hunters. Animals may move to avoid traffic noise, increasing their vulnerability to predation by other animals. One of the most significant impacts of forest roads is on water quality, through both catastrophic and chronic sources of water pollution, primarily from sediment. While it is not the case that every road will cause any or all of these impacts, for those that do, mitigation measures can be used to lessen these negative effects. These mitigation measures must begin during the location phase of the road and should continue through construction, use, and maintenance of the roads. Application of these mitigation measures allows forest managers to minimize the impacts from their forest roads when necessary.

The field of forestry has employed various computer-assisted optimisation approaches since the early 1960s to address the efficient allocation of resources towards various forest management objectives. These approaches continue to evolve, and in the last 5 years, the research has expanded to demonstrate how complex, non-linear relationships can be recognised and incorporated into planning processes at the tree, stand, forest and landscape levels. In addition to an overview of the use of optimisation in forestry, we provide an examination of work published in the last 5 years from 30 international journals, worldwide, which consistently publish forestry and natural resource management research papers. Through this review, we found that landscape-level optimisation is a relatively new and expanding area of research, most often performed by one large public landowner in regions where the resulting plan of action has an effect on all landowners and resources. We also note that at the forest level, exact methods for optimising systems mainly continue to be used, and at the stand level, optimisation seems to now involve exploration of a variety of analytical methods. A large portion of the recent research in the optimisation of forest management have involved European forests, which is a function of large public ownership of land and the tradition and requirements for management planning, and roughly half of the effort has arisen from researchers located in Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden).

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