Planning efforts for sustainable forest development marked the beginning of the evolution of organized forest management. Initially, the effort to secure a balanced flow of income for forest landowners resulted in the regulation of forest products quantity. Today, in many parts of the world, it is necessary to take into consideration alternative silvicultural systems, multi-functional management, natural regeneration, site-adapted tree species, climate, and ecological change constraints. Therefore there is a need to define sustainable management scenarios with respect to these current objectives. To be able to simultaneously consider multiple objectives and constraints, it is necessary to use contemporary simulation and optimisation techniques and methods that are being developed in different countries.

The Forest Management Planning unit will bring together experts in forest management concentrated in fast-growing plantations, nature conservation planning, simulation, optimisation, risk analysis techniques and methods for adaptation to climate change. The objective of the unit is to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, experiences, ideas, methods and models of sustainable forest management facing society today. Further, the objective of the unit is to disseminate knowledge to decision and policy makers in a way that contributes to forest policy and that facilitates implementation of new methods and tools for forest management planning in response to changing forest ecosystems.

The Unit includes six subunits dealing with various aspects of Forest management planning:
4.04.02 - Planning and economics of fast-growing plantation forests
4.04.03 - SilvaPlan: Forest management planning terminology
4.04.04 - Sustainable forest management scheduling
4.04.06 - Nature conservation planning
4.04.07 - Risk analysis
4.04.08 - Adaptation to climate change

The Unit is promoting international co-operation in forestry research related to the forest management and cross-disciplinary collaboration to contribute to sustainable forest management.

State of Knowledge

Hot topics in this area are how to incorporate issues such as sustainability and certification, climate change and carbon sequestration or biodiversity, landscape and recreational values into multi-objective forest management planning supported by decision support systems.

The research concentrates on the development of optimization models, mathematical techniques for generating plans, and also on analyses of impacts of different types of management systems on the future face of forest ecosystems and their relationship with society.

The common objective is to provide to the community of forest managers advanced models and tools for adaptive management in rapidly changing global conditions.