Constraint Modeling for Forest Management

Abstract

Forestmanagement is an activity of prime economic and ecological impor2 tance. Managed forest areas can span very large regions and their proper manage3 ment is paramount to an effective development, in terms both of economic and natural 4 resources planning. Amanaged activity consists of individual andmutually indepen5 dent policy choices which apply to distinct patches of land—named stands—which, 6 as a whole, make up the forest area. A forest management plan typically spans a 7 period of time on the order of a century and is normally geared towards the optimisa8 tion of economic or environmental metrics (e.g. total wood yield.) In this article we 9 present a method which uses a declarative programming approach to formalise and 10 solve a long-term forest management problem.We do so based on a freely available 11 state-of-the-art constraint programming system,whichwe extend to naturally express 12 concepts related to the core problem and efficiently compute solutions thereto.