Promoting harvesting stands connectivity and its economic implications in Brazilian forest plantations applying integer linear programming and simulated annealing

Author

Andrey Lessa Derci Augustynczik, Julio Eduardo Arce, Rasoul Yousefpour and Arinei Carlos Lindbeck da Silva

Forest Policy and Economics, 2016, vol. 73, issue C, pages 120-129

Abstract: The spatial allocation of harvesting activities is a challenging task for forest managers, given the complexity of coordinating operations and the great contribution of harvesting to the total cost of wood production. Traditionally, forest harvesting policies have intended to limit maximum clear-cut areas, leading to harvesting fragmentation, and have thus reduced interior forest habitat and negatively affected operational efficiency. Aiming to address this issue, the main goals of this study were i) to propose approaches to include harvesting connectivity into a forest planning model, and ii) to evaluate the impacts of enforcing connectivity on the economic outcomes of the forest. We applied two approaches for clustering forest harvesting: (i) a model based on the Minimum Spanning Tree problem for enforcing harvesting connectivity and (ii) a Simulated Annealing approach for simultaneous consideration of harvesting stands connectivity and wood flow. The optimization process could reduce the average harvesting radius from 4575.8 up to 2300.5m and increase the average area of harvesting blocks from 22.4 up to 157.4ha. However, this solution would marginally reduce the net present values (from 3.9% to 15.4%) compared to the base scenario, without the inclusion of connectivity requirements and depending on the level of enforced connectivity.

Keywords: Forest planning; Spatial modeling; Minimum spanning tree; Simulated annealing; Forest harvesting; Harvesting blocks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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