Dealing with Ecological Objectives in the Monsu Planning System

• Autor(a) principal: Pukkala,Timo
• Data de Publicação: 2004
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0870-63522004000100001
• topic: ecological planning; forest planning; heuristics; landscape metrics; numerical optimisation

The article describes some approaches to incorporate ecological objectives into numerical forest planning when using the Monsu software. Monsu first simulates alternative treatment schedules for all stands in the planning area, over a user-specified planning horizon. It then seeks the best combination of stands' treatment schedules using numerical optimisation. Management objectives are included in the optimisation model either as objective variables or constraints. The ecological variables that Monsu can calculate - and which can therefore be considered in optimisation - include (1) ordinary but ecologically oriented forest characteristics such as deadwood volume and area of old forest, (2) a special biodiversity score calculated for the forest, and (3) a set of landscape metrics. Landscape metrics are variables that measure the sizes, shapes, relative arrangement and connectivity of habitat patches as well as their total area. The most recent development of Monsu has concentrated on the use of landscape metrics, which measure the forest’s ecological quality at the landscape level. A proper scale of ecological planning depends on the size of the territory of the species considered, and it seems that most of the keynote species have rather large territories and therefore require forest rather than stand level evaluations of ecological quality.