Simulated Annealing and Cloud Computing Applied to Forest Planning

Forest landscape management has to respect nature and consider multiple-objectives such as timber production, economic development, wildlife habitat, biodiversity, recreation, water quality, and air quality. Forest landscape management does not only consider "what we can take from the landscape each year" but also consider "what we can create in the landscape". The quantity, quality and spatial patch arrangements of different forest stands are common indicators for a typical forest landscape. How to arrange stand patches for multiple-objectives within a limited forest landscape is complicated. Forest landscape models have become essential for quickly analyzing the effects of different forest management decisions on a landscape. Forest landscape models are tools that can help planners and managers make informed decisions to optimize, sustain, and balance ecological, social, and economic objectives of a forest landscape. With the same amount forest stands in a landscape, proper patch arrangements can greatly increase multiple functions. In this paper, we demonstrate how we can layout forest treatment units and schedule treatment activities to achieve and maintain the desired forests for multiple management objectives of landscapes using Cloud Computing and Simulated Annealing algorithms.