Forest management optimization across spatial scales to reconcile economic and conservation objectives

Abstract

Conflicts between biodiversity conservation and resource production can be mitigated by multi-objective management planning. Optimizing management for multiple objectives over larger land areas likely entails trading off the practicability of the process against the goodness of the solution. It is therefore worthwhile to resolve how large areas are required as management planning regions to reconcile conflicting objectives as effectively as possible. We aimed to reveal how the extent of forestry planning regions impacts the potential to mitigate a forestry-conservation conflict in Finland, represented as a trade-off between harvest income and deadwood availability. We used forecasted data from a forest simulator, a hierarchy of forestry planning regions, and an optimization model to explore the production possibility frontier between harvest income and deadwood. We compared the overall outcomes when management was optimized within the different-sized planning regions in terms of the two objectives, the spatial variation of deadwood, and the optimal combinations of management regimes. Increasing the size of the planning regions did produce higher simultaneous levels of the two objectives, but the differences were most often of the magnitude of only a few percentages. The differences among the scales were minor also in terms of the spatial variation in deadwood availability and in the optimal management combinations. The conflict between timber harvesting and deadwood availability is only marginally easier to mitigate at large spatial scales than at small forest ownership scales. However, regardless of the spatial scale of planning, the achievable solutions may not be good enough to safeguard deadwood-dependent biodiversity without active deadwood creation.

A Multi-Criteria Decision Support System for Strategic Planning at the Swiss Forest Enterprise Level: Coping With Climate Change and Shifting Demands in Ecosystem Service Provisioning

“…If different management strategies are to be used at the same time, the question arises at which exact locations the respective strategies are to be implemented best. To solve such challenging combinatorial problems, optimization models can be used, as described for example by Knoke et al (2016) for robust optimization or Pohjanmies et al (2019) to reconcile economic and conservation objectives. For communication with stakeholders, a furthermore highly promising development are visualization systems at the stand and enterprise scale (e.g., Pretzsch et al, 2008).…”

Balancing ecological and economic objectives in restoration of fire-adapted forests

“…While tradeoffs in fire adapted systems mostly concern how management can reduce losses from wildfire disturbances (Schroder et al 2016), in boreal systems the concern is the negative impacts of logging on biodiversity and other ecosystem services (Triviño et al 2017). Tradeoffs among multiple conflicting objectives are common in forest management systems and can be compensated by diversifying management to include a wider array of harvesting practices (Pohjanmies et al 2019;Triviño et al 2017). Nonlinearity means that the steepness of the tradeoff among variables can be affected by the level of the production of each of the other objectives and is central to the idea of production frontiers.…”

Economic-statistical Evaluation of Sustainable Development of Forest Trees

“…Sustainable forest management (SFM) must ensure appropriate environmental, social but also economically viable conditions for the future development. Therefore, the requirements of sustainable forest management should always be adapted to the new requirements and must take into account the specific environmental and ecological conditions as well as the political, economic, spiritual and cultural dimensions [1]. DOI: 10.18421/TEM103-40 https://doi.org/10.18421/TEM103-40…”

“…It is recommended to consider using larger areas to achieve better options for forest management and its optimization in order to properly balance often the conflicting goals, namely the timber harvest whilst at the same time to strive for biodiversity conservation. Increasing the forest management areas can improve to certain degree the planning optimization in regard to both objectives [1]. The SFM supports the most important economic, environmental and social functions at regional, but also national and global levels, without having a negative impact on the remaining ecosystems [2].…”