A climate change adaptive dynamic programming approach to optimize eucalypt stand management scheduling. A Portuguese application.

This paper aims at presenting approaches to optimize stand-level short rotation coppice management planning considering uncertainty in stand growth due to climate change. The focus is on addressing climate uncertainty through a range of climate scenarios so that an adaptive capacity may be possible and the vulnerability to climate change may be reduced. The optimization encompasses finding both the harvest age in each cycle and the number of coppice cycles within a full rotation that maximize net present revenue. The innovation lies in the combination of the process-based model (Glob-3PG), with two dynamic programming (DP) approaches. The former is able to project growth of eucalypt stands under climate change scenarios. The innovative approaches are thus influential to define the management policy that maximizes net present revenue considering uncertainty in forest growth due to climate change. The first approach proposes the optimal policy under each climate change scenario at each state. The second approach addresses further situations when the climate scenario is unknown at the beginning of the planning horizon. Both help address uncertainty in an adaptive framework as a set of readily available options is proposed for each scenario. Results for a typical Portuguese Eucalyptus globulus Labill stand are discussed.

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