A Strategic Forest Management Model for Optimizing Timber Yield and Carbon Sequestration

Strategic forest management planning models designed to maintain existing carbon stocks and maximize capacity for future sequestration can help identify underused opportunities to increase carbon stocks without diminishing other forest products. This study proposed a carbon stock unit that allows summing up the stocks in the different forest pools even if the decomposition far exceeds the planning horizon. This unit is used to integrate the methods and algorithms from the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3) model into a wood supply model. The resulting model could be used to predict changes in carbon stocks, transfers between carbon pools, and greenhouse gas emissions that would result from every forest management activity. We tailored this model to meet different strategies: maximizing carbon storage in the forest, maximizing high-sustained timber yield, and achieving the dual objectives of yield and carbon storage. A range of management scenarios were simulated using the data of a 485,000 hectares mixed-wood forest in Quebec, Canada. Our results demonstrate that, with the reduction in the harvest rates, the increase in the ecosystem carbon storage is insufficient to offset the carbon losses associated with the increase in the harvest rates.