Stand-Level Forest Management Planning Approaches

Seeking an optimal operational regime under different management environments has been one of the main concerns of forest managers. Traditionally, the main operational regime includes planting density or regeneration scheme, thinning time/intensity, and optimal time to harvest over the given time horizon. Deterministic approaches to tackle this type of optimization problem with different controls have dominated the solution techniques in forestry literature. We present in this paper an overview of the methodologies used in stand-level optimization, in which we show the strengths and weaknesses of these methodologies as well as provide comments on the effectiveness of the methodology. We then propose a new dynamic programing approach for generalizing solution specification and techniques.