Harvest: A Timber Harvest Allocation Model for Simulating Management Alternatives

Abstract

Landscapes primarily comprised of forests have become highly valued by society because of the multiple benefits derived from forested habitats. These benefits include stable quantities and quality of water, forest products, resources to support the ecological and human communities that are associated with forests, and a relatively natural setting for recreation and aesthetic enjoyment. A large proportion of the North American landscape is directly and indirectly structured by forestry practices. Traditional forest management has largely focused on the management of individual stands (Tang and Gustafson 1997) and only recently has the need to take a landscape perspective been embraced. As a result, forest management has become increasingly complex because of the multiple values, resources, and scales that must be considered in the development of a forest management plan. Timber harvesting strategies are especially scrutinized because logging introduces disturbance that can have effects at multiple scales and on many attributes of ecological systems. Both time (when an activity will occur) and space (where an activity will occur) need to be considered simultaneously when evaluating the cumulative impacts of forest management activities. However, this is a complex task. Because there are ecological consequences related to landscape patterns in space and time, quantitative, spatial tools are needed to assess the long-term spatial consequences of alternative management strategies (Franklin and Forman 1987; Hemstrom and Cissel 1991; Li et al. 1992; Thompson 1993). Simulation models that incorporate both temporal and spatial dynamics (e.g., Czaran and Bartha 1992; Li et al. 1993; Liu 1993; Wallin et al. 1994; Gustafson and Crow 1996; Gustafson 1996) can be helpful in these assessments.