Analysis and planning systems for multiresource, sustainable forestry:: the Heureka research programme at SLU

Forest management in Sweden today, as in many other places, involves the management of multiple resources for diverse purposes, such as promoting biodiversity, recreation, hunting, carbon sequestration, and reindeer herding as well as wood production. Sustainability is no longer related only to timber production; it now embraces the composition, processes, and functions of the entire ecosystem. Moreover, pressure from substitute products requires the production of timber, wood fuel, etc., to be economically competitive. The increased complexity of forest management has intensified the need for improved instruments for analysis and decision support. In response to this, a research programme aiming to develop new systems for forest management analysis and planning was recently initiated at the Forest Faculty, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), in which research efforts in different fields are being linked in a common framework to generate models and methods with the following desired attributes. The new systems should be designed with (i) a modular structure to allow the development of different applications, (ii) the landscape as the basic planning unit, (iii) the tree as the basic unit of projection of the tree layer, (iv) models of the interactions between processes and the management of the tree layer, and (v) models for evaluating risks and uncertainties in the data acquired and model projections. We believe that the separation of the system into a decision phase and a projection phase should facilitate the analysis of large and complex multiresource planning problems and suggest in this paper possible avenues for implementing such a feature. Since spatial problems are inherent in many biodiversity-related applications, we propose that appropriate spatially structuring principles should be included in the design of the system. The complex trade-offs involved when selecting ecosystem models in relation to the purpose of the analysis and data availability are highlighted.