In the mid 1970's, two critical forest planning directives were legislated by Congress. The Forest and Rangelands Renewable Resoures Planning Act (RPA), mandating that the U.S. Forest service undertake long-range planning initiatives, was passed in 1974. The National Forest Management Act of 1976 amended the RPA planning process. Together, these...
The main objective of this study was to offer an alternative methodology for
forest sector modeling in developing economies. To this effect, a policy preference
function was developed and estimated using data from the forest sector of the Cote
d'Ivoire.
The justification for this alternative framework for forest sector analysis...
An analysis of the economics of multiple use forest
planning is presented. At the forest level itself it is
demonstrated the use of duality information provided by
linear programming to price nonmarket commodities
allocations and to establish an accounting system in
multiple use forest management. The use of post-optimal
activity...
The purpose of this dissertation is to formulate,
analyze and numerically solve the dynamic harvesting problem
for uneven-aged stands. The problem is to find the
optimal numbers of trees to remove from diameter classes
over a finite time horizon and is formulated as a
discrete-time optimal-control problem with bounded control...
To abstract the fundamental market structures of stumpage sold from the Siuslaw National Forest, a three-equation structural model with different assumptions on private cut was empirically derived. Under the private cut price-fixed assumption, the structural model can be simplified as a single-equation model with stumpage price as dependent variable and...
One traditional problem in forest management is to
find the optimal stand level management regime. Four
important silvicultural practices including precommercial
thinning, commercial thinning, fertilization and regeneration
harvest are considered jointly in this study. The
partial analyses, i.e. considering some of the silvicultural
practices, are also discussed.
The inability to...
A dynamic programming algorithm (MS PATH) was used to develop a stand level optimization model, FPS Optimizer. The model incorporates a late-seral constraint on the profit maximizing objective function utilizing a four-descriptor structural index as a proxy. This index, the 'Old-Growth Index', rates the late-seral structural quality of a given...
An analytical algorithm to formulate a sparser set of adjacency constraints than the conventional algorithm is proposed. Utilizing matrix algebra applied to an adjacency matrix, constraints are systematically and efficiently derived by the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm is proved to provide a true set of adjacency constraints in the...
Three data sets were examined to determine the costs with and without
constrained forest management practices. Two adjacent sites in the Coast Range of
Oregon were studied. One of the units was broadcast burned while the adjacent site was
left unburned. The stands were projected for growth and yield in...
Lagrangean relaxation is presented as a solution
technique to solve flow constrained area-based harvest
scheduling problems. The best set of multipliers in the
Lagrangean approach is obtained through the subgradient
method. Guidelines to set some parameters to compute the
step size in the subgradient algorithm are provided. An
additional procedure...