Background: Many forested landscapes throughout the world involve a mix of public forest ownerships. This study explores how coordinated planning between two large public ownerships in Minnesota impact landscape-level...Background: Many forested landscapes throughout the world involve a mix of public forest ownerships. This study explores how coordinated planning between two large public ownerships in Minnesota impact landscape-level trade-offs between timber production and production of core area of older forest (COF) for the region. COF is an important metric for wildlife habitat. Emphasis is on better understanding potential gains from both coordinated planning at the site-level where ownerships share stand boundaries and from coordinated planning at a broader policy level involving assumed values of COF by the public. The study area involves over 300,000 ha, 150,000 analysis units and a 100-year planning horizon. Methods: The concept of influence zones in modeling spatial interdependencies is described and implemented. The estimated total area of COF is assumed an important landscape metric for forest wildlife habitat condition for each forest planning period. COF has a surrounding buffer protecting it from edge effects. Differences are recognized between COF condition requirements and condition requirements for its surrounding buffer. A spatially-explicit harvest scheduling model is applied in conjunction with moving-windows techniques of GIS to find near-optimal management schedules for the large landscape. Multiple model runs are examined to help better understand both potential gains from coordinated planning and the tradeoffs between timber and COF production. Results: Results demonstrate the ability to incorporate detailed site-level COF production into management scheduling models for broad, landscape-level planning. For the study area and the assumed COF definitions, substantially larger gains are possible by coordinating COF value assumptions across ownerships, as compared to possible gains from coordinating on-the-ground management activities in areas involving shared stand boundaries. Although a general map of the study area shows a definite intertwining mosaic of ownership by the two large public agencies, a deta展开更多
基金funded jointly by the Minnesota Forest Resources Council,the University of Minnesota North Central ResearchOutreach Centerand the Interagency Information Cooperative of the Department of Forest Resources,University of Minnesota
文摘Background: Many forested landscapes throughout the world involve a mix of public forest ownerships. This study explores how coordinated planning between two large public ownerships in Minnesota impact landscape-level trade-offs between timber production and production of core area of older forest (COF) for the region. COF is an important metric for wildlife habitat. Emphasis is on better understanding potential gains from both coordinated planning at the site-level where ownerships share stand boundaries and from coordinated planning at a broader policy level involving assumed values of COF by the public. The study area involves over 300,000 ha, 150,000 analysis units and a 100-year planning horizon. Methods: The concept of influence zones in modeling spatial interdependencies is described and implemented. The estimated total area of COF is assumed an important landscape metric for forest wildlife habitat condition for each forest planning period. COF has a surrounding buffer protecting it from edge effects. Differences are recognized between COF condition requirements and condition requirements for its surrounding buffer. A spatially-explicit harvest scheduling model is applied in conjunction with moving-windows techniques of GIS to find near-optimal management schedules for the large landscape. Multiple model runs are examined to help better understand both potential gains from coordinated planning and the tradeoffs between timber and COF production. Results: Results demonstrate the ability to incorporate detailed site-level COF production into management scheduling models for broad, landscape-level planning. For the study area and the assumed COF definitions, substantially larger gains are possible by coordinating COF value assumptions across ownerships, as compared to possible gains from coordinating on-the-ground management activities in areas involving shared stand boundaries. Although a general map of the study area shows a definite intertwining mosaic of ownership by the two large public agencies, a deta