A strategic forest planning model for integrating economic and ecological management goals

Timber harvest plan in forest management should be flexible to meet changing social and environmental needs. We need to collect and process the proper forest information, which will enhance the efficiency of working process in the harvest plan. Especially, GIS and RS techniques have been considered to have a benefit in processing the multidimensional information. The purpose of this study is to present strategic forest planning procedure that can support the identification of forest structures and the maximum use of forest functions through GIS, RS and LP techniques. In this study, forest information such as compartment structure and forest road was entered into GIS to construct FMIS. DEM was constructed using base maps of 1/5000 for the geographic analysis. Aerial photographs and DEMs were used to create orthophoto. Orthophoto was used to classify forest into 3 types, artificial, natural and bare forest. And then geographical attributes of each forest type were identified. Sugi (Cryptomeria japonica) forest area of each forest type was used in the harvest simulation. A spatial constraint, distance from a forest road, is taken into consideration in the LP. New grouping unit, so called "harvest unit", was introduced as the forest management unit. Strategic forest planning based on the "harvest unit" was proposed that considering both of the economic and environmental aspects of forest.