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4.04.04 - Sustainable forest management scheduling

UNIT NOTICEBOARD

2024-02-20

20th SSAFR Coming Up!

20th Symposium on Systems Analysis in Forest Resources (SSAFR 2024)
Hondarribia, Basque Country, Spain; 13-17 May 2024
Units involved: 4.04.04, 4.04.06.

Since 1975, SSAFR has been the premier international forum for forest systems analysis, operations research (OR) and decision science. The SSAFR community has been the primary contributor to almost all key forest management and planning research during the past century, e.g., harvest scheduling, supply chain, forest health, spatial optimization, wildland fire risk management, simulation, stochastic process, and forest and fire economics. The SSAFR community also embraces the opportunities of emerging new data science technologies and the challenges from the global climate changes.

This 20th  symposium will accept abstracts related with the following subjects:

  1. Application of Remote Sensing In Forestry
  2. Forest Modelling
  3. Forest management and planning
  4. Forest transportation and supply chain optimization
  5. Wildfire risk simulation, management and decision support
  6. Forest health, invasive species, and wildlife habitat management
  7. Spatially explicit optimization
  8. Stochastic process simulation and optimization
  9. Quantitative forest and fire economics
  10. Forest and watershed management  
  11. Data science and machine learning
  12. Forest systems analysis under the impact of climate change


Abstract submission deadline:  1 March 2024

Details:  https://decisiones.ctfc.cat/SSAFR2024/

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Coordinator:

José G. Borges, Portugal

Deputies:

Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo, Portugal

About Unit

Unit 4.04.04 focuses on the development and application of new methods and tools for efficiently and effectively managing forests. An objective of this unit is to facilitate interaction, dissemination and exchange of new models, methods and technological innovations to address sustainable forest management scheduling through workshops, conferences, and publications.


State of Knowledge

Forests serve a multitude of functions and addressing so many different goals to satisfy the needs of forest owners, the forest industry, and society poses a considerable challenge for forest managers. Sustainable forest ecosystem management scheduling involves complex decision-making processes that cannot be addressed by empirical methods only, but requires advanced decision-support tools. Research and development in the past 30 years have enabled substantial changes in the practice of forest management. There is a wide experience of developing and applying management science approaches and computerized decision-support tools for sustainable forest management.

Key to further innovation and success of sustainable forest management scheduling is the development and dissemination of research that may target hot topics such as a) the architecture and implementation of decision support systems (DSS), b) the models and methods to support decision-making in DSS, c) the knowledge management techniques in DSS and d) the participatory processes to be supported by DSS.

This will be influential to innovation in several processes within sustainable forest management scheduling namely:  (1) operational, tactical and strategic forest management decision analysis, (2) assessment and analysis of forestry projects, (3) economic and environmental impact assessment of forestry projects and programs, (4) decision analysis as a forest policy tool, (5) participatory forest resources decision making and collaborative planning, (6) methodologies for regional and national forestland use planning and (7) the development of both undergraduate and graduate level forest resources management and economics courses.