Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe development of forest management plans is a multi‐criteria problem that usually involves multiple stakeholders. In forested recreational areas or natural parks, stakeholders could include government officials, forest companies and visitors to the area. With the progress of mobile phone technology, preference information (including aesthetic values) can be conveniently obtained from stakeholders while they are in the forest. This paper develops a methodological approach that incorporates place‐specific opinion preference into the development of alternative forest management plans. Through the use of a modified Compromise Programming approach, prospective alternatives are developed, which optimize the opinions of stakeholders and the quantity of timber over time depending on specified parameters. The analysis is based on a small simulated forest holding and place‐specific simulated opinion data. To allow for a comparison between potential stakeholder groups, the opinion data was generated by a method that produced three separate groups. The results indicate the practical use of place‐specific preferences and provide a means to incorporate the information to generate possible alternative plans. In addition, the analysis highlights that by segregating the preference information into groups, the planning of more specific courses of actions can be made. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractIn forest management planning, participatory planning processes are often encouraged as a means to acquire relevant information and to enhance the stakeholders' acceptability of alternative plans. This requires the aggregation of the stakeholders' preferences that can be done in a wide variety of manners. The aggregation process strives to reduce the information into a single set of preferences that simplifies the information and allows for the use of discrete decision support tools. Depending on how the preferences are aggregated, a wide range of plan rankings can emerge. Although this range of ranking complicates the issue of plan selection, it does highlight the uncertainty involved in aggregating stakeholder preferences. In this study, we suggest an alternative method of deriving rankings for a set of alternative management options. Our proposed method suggests treating acquired preferences as the uncertain elements of a stochastic programming problem and the results provide the decision maker with the acceptability probability for each plan. The method is illustrated with a case of pairwise comparisons from a set of stakeholders representing preferences from different interest groups in a community planning process.

One of the most pressing challenges for governments is how to move from a fossil- to a bio-based economy to achieve a sustainable growth. Bio-economy encompasses the production of renewable biological resources and the conversion of these resources into value-added products, such as biofuels. The use of bioenergy is regarded as an important climate change mitigation strategy and its annual demand is rapidly increasing. In particular, there is immense pressure to use boreal forest resources as bioenergy for meeting the challenging new bio-economy policy goals (EC 2012). For example, Finland will need to largely intensify timber production because policy aims at increasing the levels of energy production from forest wood. On the other hand, boreal forests provide crucial ecosystem services such as climate regulation through carbon storage, timber production and provision of non-timber forest products. This intensification of forest biomass extraction is potentially in conflict with forest ecosystem services like mushrooms (due to soil damaging activities during forest management) or key resources for biodiversity like deadwood. Here, first we review what is known and unknown about the effects of increased biomass harvesting on ecosystem services and biodiversity. Second, we present a modelling framework that combines forest growth simulations and optimization tools to investigate the impacts of increased forest biomass extraction on key ecosystem services (carbon storage, collectable goods and scenic beauty) and biodiversity (deadwood resources) in Finland. The work is part of the Sumforest project FutureBioEcon. Reference: EC (2012) Innovating for Sustainable Growth - A Bioeconomy for Europe. European Commission. Brussels. ; peerReviewed