A Decision Support System for Incorporating Wildlife Habitat Quality into Forest Planning

We developed a decision support system to address wildlife habitat quality in the strategic forest planning process. The process involves projecting wildlife habitat attributes using a growth and yield model, combining the attributes into an index of structural habitat quality, generating yield tables of structural habitat quality that can be constrained or optimized in the forest planning model, and relating prescriptions for each forest planning analysis area back to the habitat attributes. The result is a map of habitat components. This mechanism is considered the first step in our wildlife habitat assessment procedure in that it focuses on within-stand or within-analysis area structures. Since many wildlife species depend on multiple stands or analysis areas and the spatial arrangement of habitat components to meet their life requisites, the second step in our habitat assessment procedure is to apply spatially explicit wildlife habitat models to the mapped planning solution. The decision support system offers the capability to evaluate the effects of alternative management strategies on wildlife habitat in the context of a forest planning model solution. West. J. Appl. For 14(2):91-99.