CEF researcher Susete Marques took part in a study that describes an iterative approach for the optimized selection of forest management actions, using simulations of fire propagation over time.
“Forest management with fire simulation” is the title of the new article published by Susete Marques, a researcher at the Forest Research Centre (CEF) / Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA), School of Agriculture, in collaboration with Filipe Alvelos (University of Minho) and Isabel Martins (University of Lisbon).
In this work, the authors address a forest management problem for timber production with fire concerns, employing a novel simulation-based optimization approach wherein forest management is iteratively guided by the feedback from fire spread simulations.
The forest management problem involves selecting an alternative prescription for each stand, subject to various restrictions (e.g. bounds on ecosystems services), to maximize the net present value. For each stand, prescriptions involve projecting forest conditions and outcomes using species-specific growth and yield models, combined with different fuel treatment scenarios. In each iteration, the optimization problem is solved.
The authors describe computational experiments in a Portuguese forest showing how trade-offs between the net present value and the maximum fire rate of spread can be obtained. When too restrictive conditions are imposed on fire, the approach suggests a set of stands to become fire breaks. The authors also conducted experiments to demonstrate how the impact of the forest surroundings, as well as bounds on ecosystem services, can be evaluated with respect to these trade-offs.
The article was published in the European Journal of Operational Research and can be found at sciencedirect.com.