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Designing green landscapes
This book presents the latest thinking in adaptive management for forest ecosystems. Based on the ‘multiple path’ principle, this approach links species choice and silvicultural methods with changing demands and changing environmental conditions, to ensure continuous adaptation, often several times within the lifetime of a tree. The ‘multiple path’ principle at the core of this approach represents a robust theoretical framework for designing forested landscapes. It provides a logical basis both for coordinating spatial objectives and for integrating varied forms of expertise; it limits planning horizons to realistic timeframes; and it allows for forecasts based on current real attributes of spatially explicit land parcels. This is in stark contrast with traditional forestry practices which simply assess the forest resource at regular time intervals and prescribe standard management schedules for specific forest types.
Decision Support for Forest Management
While earlier books concerning forest planning have tended to focus on linear programming, economic aspects, or specific multi-criteria decision aid tools, this book provides a much broader range of tools to meet a variety of planning situations. The methods themselves cover a range of decision situations – from cases involving single decision makers, through group decision making, to participatory planning. They include traditional decision support tools, from optimization to utility functions, as well as methods that are just gaining ground in forest planning – such as problem structuring methods and social choice theory. Including examples which illustrate the application of each technique to specific management planning problems, the book offers an invaluable resource for both researchers and advanced students specializing in management and planning issues relating to forestry.
