What is it about?
Forest planning is the activity that has the objective of organizing the management of forest ecosystems in time and space, based on multifunctional criteria with multiple purposes and taking into account the relationship between management costs and ecosystem benefits. In this framework, this note provides a description of the tools adopted at different levels of forest management planning and the related methodological approaches, together with a commentary discussion of the underlying paradigm and its possible updated vision.
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Why is it important?
Planning and decision-making in forestry is carried out following a hierarchical structure in time (from long term to short term) and scale (from the large extent of region and landscape to the small extent of forest stands), where decisions taken at the top address long-term directions for forest management and are gradually implemented from the largest to the local scale, fully considering the constraints that they must overcome at each hierarchical level. These hierarchical levels are usually referred to as strategic, tactical, and operational, each characterized by specific decisionmaking levels and related spatiotemporal scales.
Perspectives
The great current challenge is to move from approaches based on prediction (i.e., the root of the anticipatory management idea) to approaches based on monitoring and evaluation. This means accepting that planning optimization models actually have relatively low capacity to effectively support the management of natural renewable resources, so it is advisable to straddle from a strictly ruled forest planning to adaptive management to address risk issues, uncertainty, and indeterminacy in the context of forest planning. This evolving paradigm represents a clear shift from the classic conventional worldview, based on determinism and predictability, toward a worldview that is rooted in the theory of complex adaptive systems.
Piermaria Corona
University of Tuscia, Viterbo (Italy)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: In-between costs and benefits: the evolving paradigm of forest management planning, January 2025, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-443-31596-1.00016-7.
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