Forest Ecosystems volume 6 , Article number: 11 Cite this article. Metrics details. Many forested landscapes throughout the world involve a mix of public forest ownerships. This study explores how coordinated planning between two large public ownerships in Minnesota impact landscape-level trade-offs between timber production and production of core area of older forest COF for the region.
COF is an important metric for wildlife habitat. Emphasis is on better understanding potential gains from both coordinated planning at the site-level where ownerships share stand boundaries and from coordinated planning at a broader policy level involving assumed values of COF by the public. The concept of influence zones in modeling spatial interdependencies is described and implemented.
The estimated total area of COF is assumed an important landscape metric for forest wildlife habitat condition for each forest planning period. COF has a surrounding buffer protecting it from edge effects.
Differences are recognized between COF condition requirements and condition requirements for its surrounding buffer. A spatially-explicit harvest scheduling model is applied in conjunction with moving-windows techniques of GIS to find near-optimal management schedules for the large landscape.
Multiple model runs are examined to help better understand both potential gains from coordinated planning and the tradeoffs between timber and COF production. Results demonstrate the ability to incorporate detailed site-level COF production into management scheduling models for broad, landscape-level planning.
