Operations Research and Optimisation Techniques in Forest Management and Operations

Dear colleagues,

Forest management involves making decisions on the planning, use, and conservation of forests and related resources, including timber, water, wildlife, recreation, or a combination. Forest resource managers must make critical long- and short-term decisions, including daily operational activities. Operations research (OR) methods, primarily optimization techniques such as linear and mixed-integer programming, have been extensively used to support effective planning and management of forests and forest supply chains. Optimization is a type of prescriptive analytics that finds a “best” solution from a set of “feasible” solutions, using a mathematical algorithm that maximizes or minimizes a specified objective function subject to constraints. In forest management and planning, decision-making processes often use OR techniques to provide optimal solutions that will best meet the objectives of the landowners or land managers.

The focus of this Special Issue of Forests is on OR techniques in forest management and operations. Research articles may focus on any application of mathematical models and decision support tools for the optimization of one or more components of forest planning and operations, including decisions at strategic, tactical, and operational planning levels. Topics can include but are not limited to harvest scheduling in even and un-even forests to meet production and ecological objectives, forest planning under uncertainty (e.g., pests, fire), supply chain optimization including economic, social, and environmental objectives, optimized network design including the optimal location of timber and biomass facilities, and optimized harvesting and transport logistics. Solution techniques may include, among others, linear and nonlinear programming, mixed-integer programming, stochastic programming, multi-objective and goal programming, dynamic programming, network programming, heuristics, metaheuristics, and simulation models.

Dr. Mauricio Acuna
Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. John Sessions
Prof. Dr. Andres Weintraub
Co-Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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