Bessere Produktions- und Nutzungsentscheide mit dem Sortierungssimulator SorSim

To be able to estimate the commercial wood assortment of forests at all times is an important requirement of economical wood production. This makes it possible to improve management decisions by quantifying the revenues of alternative silvicultural and bucking strategies. So far a functional simulaton instrument for bucking single trees and whole stands was missing in forestry and in forest science in Switzerland. The SorSim bucking simulator of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) fills this gap. SorSim is implemented in Java and is platform-independent. An overview is given how the simulator works. Two examples show applications in practice and science. Of particular value is the possibility of estimating wood assortments of planned harvesting operations based on simple timber marking protocols. Especially in science and in strategic planning, SorSim allows the analysis of the long-term development of revenues of forest stands given different silvicultural methods. Combining SorSim with IT-based harvesting productivity models provides greater insight. Further development of SorSim entails testing different optimization approaches, e.g. single tree bucking to value and whole stand bucking to order