Forest sustainability can only be achieved if – alongside timber production – additional goals are considered in the planning process. The future of forest planning integrates the socio-economics, resources extraction and societal needs in complex models that explore different constraints, objectives and scenario analysis.

People at FRESH are involved in the development and application of process optimization techniques from the fields of management studies and operations research. Combined with silvicultural, climate change, operations, and landscape ecological knowledge these method can be used in the creation of open sourced models, and forest management plans for our forests.

To ensure the sustainability of management plans is not jeopardized by the unexpected – such as windthrow or insect calamities – risk analysis plays an important role. For this purpose, we are researching the use of methods such as the portfolio theory, stochastic dominance or the information-gap theory.

Information from ground-based forest inventories to achieve those goals does not always exist. In recent years, highly promising alternatives, such as GIS-based, LiDAR, and hyper spectral satellite data collection methods have been developed. Together with our colleagues from the Integrated Remote Sensing Studio, we work on the development of inventory methods as well as interfaces between data delivery and forest management planning.