Bi-Level Participatory Forest Management Planning Supported by Pareto Frontier Visualization

Abstract This research addresses the problem of forested landscape management planning in contexts characterized by multiple ecosystem services and multiple stakeholders. A new methodology for participatory landscape-level forest management is proposed. Specifically, a bilevel representation is used, whereas models of subsystems are used for constructing an integrated model of the master problem. Participatory workshops and interactive visualization of the Pareto frontier are used to support the solution of the multi-objective optimization upper- and lower-level problems. The visualization is implemented by a technique—Interactive Decision Maps—that displays interactively the Pareto frontier in the form of decision maps, that is, collections of the objectives’ tradeoff curves. Since the upper-level problem may be characterized by a large number of decision variables, we compare the Pareto frontier generated by the Interactive Decision Maps technique with the Pareto frontier generated by a decomposition approach that builds from the Pareto frontiers of the lower-level subproblems. The approach supports further the negotiation between upper- and lower-level goals. Results are discussed for a large-scale application in a forested landscape in northwest Portugal.