Forest harvest scheduling with clearcut and core area constraints

Teresa Neto (), Miguel Constantino (), Isabel Martins () and João Pedro Pedroso ()
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Teresa Neto: Instituto Politécnico de Viseu
Miguel Constantino: Universidade de Lisboa
Isabel Martins: Universidade de Lisboa
João Pedro Pedroso: Universidade do Porto

Annals of Operations Research, 2017, vol. 258, issue 2, No 13, 453-478

Abstract: Abstract Many studies regarding environmental concerns in forest harvest scheduling problems deal with constraints on the maximum clearcut size. However, these constraints tend to disperse harvests across the forest and thus to generate a more fragmented landscape. When a forest is fragmented, the amount of edge increases at the expense of the core area. Highly fragmented forests can neither provide the food, cover, nor the reproduction needs of core-dependent species. This study presents a branch-and-bound procedure designed to find good feasible solutions, in a reasonable time, for forest harvest scheduling problems with constraints on maximum clearcut size and minimum core habitat area. The core area is measured by applying the concept of subregions. In each branch of the branch-and-bound tree, a partial solution leads to two children nodes, corresponding to the cases of harvesting or not a given stand in a given period. Pruning is based on constraint violations or unreachable objective values. The approach was tested with forests ranging from some dozens to more than a thousand stands. In general, branch-and-bound was able to quickly find optimal or good solutions, even for medium/large instances.

Keywords: Forest planning; Core area; Edge effect; Clearcut; Integer programming; Branch-and-bound (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-016-2313-2

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