Determining the effects of harvesting guidelines on the age-class profile of the residual forest
1993
Nelson, J.D. | Shannon, T. | Errico, D.
Chromatic scheduling was used to demonstrate that harvest unit adjacency constraints can be translated into age-class profile constraints that are suitable for regulating the rate of harvest in strategic forest planning models. The advantage of the age-class approach is that strategic harvest rates will reflect the spatial constraints without the onerous task of designing and scheduling cut blocks for the entire forest. Other factors that are relevant to determining the steady-state age-class profile are the exclusion period and the width of the leave strip between any two harvest units. Through the analysis of four spatial data sets it was observed that the chromatic number decreases as the block size increases-, however, the absolute block size was not a factor. The controlling factor is the underlying block pattern (maximum number of adjacent units and the number of units sharing a common boundary point). When high chromatic numbers are combined with long exclusions periods the results are long rotations and reduced periodic harvests. There is a wide range in the number and timing of harvest entries and the resulting age-class structures that are spatially feasible. This suggests that resource policy makers should think in terms of the desired residual forest structure prior to prescribing harvesting guidelines
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