Optimisation in Forest Management

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).