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The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) Bureau of Forestry is in the midst of its first major planning effort since the mid 1980s. Our project, which started in 1908, is to develop an information management and planning system to facilitate timber management planning on approximately 1.25 million acres of state forest land zoned for multiple resource management. The information management system will help the bureau oganize inventory information, growth and yield models, economic data, and other information to develop timber management plans for the multiple resource management zones on each of Pennsylvania's 20 state forests. Up to now, work has focused on data collection and software development; actual plan development is slated to begin in spring 2001. The primary goals of this planning effort are to move the state's forests toward a more balanced age-class distribution while providing a sustained yield of quality forest products.
A key componennt of the planning system is a computer program that will use linear programming to schedule timber harvests across forest types, site classes, and age classes. The program will attempt to maximize net social benefits from the forest while abiding by constrrrraints specifying target forest conditions, sustainable timber harvests, and budget forest conditions, sustainable timber harvests, and budget and personal constraints. The program will use the best currently available information about forest dynamics and the impact of management practices to project the condition ofthe forest over time under different management alternatives. This state-of-the-art management planning system will allow the Bureau of Forestry to project impact of their management decisions and constraints on the state of their forests for both the medium-term (2 to 10 years) and long-term (10 to 50 years). It will also allow them to deploy resources such as personnel and budgets to meet their strategic objectives for the state forests more effectively. Equally important, it will help them document the impact of personnel and budget constraints on their ability to meet medium-term and lnog-term ecological, social and economic objectives.
One of the key limitations of the current modeling approachh is that it is not spatially explicit. That is, the planning system does not project the exact location of different management activities on the ground. Research has shown that such models can be different to implement on the ground and often overestimate sustainable timber harvests. Considerable progress has been made as part of this project in refining spatially explicit forest management modeling techniques. This research has laid the foundation for beginning in 2001 and 2002. A spatially explicit plan will be developed for a small area of the state forest as a pilot program. Eventually, spatially explicit planning will help state forest managers tighten the relationship between long-range, large-scale strategic planning and day-to-day management activities. For planning to be eeffective, this relationship must work both ways-with detailed information from the field being used to refine strategic planning and with strategic planning influencing day-to-day activities so that long-range, large-scale goals are met. Spatially explicit planning will enable closer monitoring of whether goals are being met and validation and fine-tuning of the planning information and models.
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