Managing your MAI, gaining FSC certification and securing sustainable wood supply
Managing your MAI, gaining FSC certification and securing sustainable wood supply Nowadays, biofuels for wood pellets, short rotation plantation forest for pulpwood and sustainable forest management (e.g. FSC Certification and HVCF are being cutted) are hottest topic for discussion. Securing a sustainable biomass for biofuels and sustainable wood supply for pulp industries is essential for economic viability and survival of these industries. Good forest accessment methodology and forest inventory are essential to sustainable forest management. Accurate growth and yield models should be developed and frequent data validation is needed to reflect a realistic mean annual increment (MAI) and yield for every forest stands. Improving MAI through good genetic stocks, site preparation, fertisation and good silvicultural regimes are needed to ensure better MAI or on par with the previous rotation (e.g. first rotation MAI). These are good plantation forest management initiatives. But these envedours and initiatives are focused on tree-level and stand-level as aspect of forest management. The flipside of the forest management is the forest estate management modelling and forest economics. Forest estate management modelling and forest economics utilize the tree-level and forest stand data plus estate data (e.g. GIS data, prices, supply and demands scenarios, etc.). It also caters to the needs and problems of strategic, tactical and operational planning. It focuses on forest estate and multiperiod planning (i.e. managing the forest stand MAI and yield, Forest Steward Certification (5 to 10-year Timber Harvesting Plans for Custody and traceability of Wood Supply) and projecting your sustainable wood supply. FSC (North America (US and Canada)) and SFI certification requires a 5-year Timber Harvesting Plans. One of requirements for timber harvesting plan is to comply with the Timber Stand adjancency situation (i.e. not cutting adjancent stands in the same period for greening up and ecological purposes). Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) and LP modelling are suitable tool for multiperiod planning. MIP and LP modelling been used in forest management since 1963. However, MIP models are hard to implement and solve with the traditional MIP (Branch and Cut) algorithms. With new heuristic algorithms (e.g. proximity search, etc.) incorporated in new LP and MIP solvers, MIP models can be solved in few hours and with desktop computers. Spatial MIP Timber Harvesting Model is developed. The model has 2000 forest stands and 10-year planning period. The objective is to maximise total volume harvested. Two constraints are imposed: 1). Stand Adjacency, and 2). Non Declining Volume (NDY). The model has 120693 rows (constraints), 20010 columns (variables), 312547 non-zeros, 20000 integer variables, all of which are binary. The model is solved in 3 hours. The model determines your sustainable non declining woood supply (not only for 5 years, but 10 years plann
