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Can mature patch constraints mitigate the fragmenting effects of harvest opening size restrictions?
Author(s) -
Rebain S.,
McDill M. E.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
international transactions in operational research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.032
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1475-3995
pISSN - 0969-6016
DOI - 10.1111/1475-3995.00424
Subject(s) - offset (computer science) , time horizon , fragmentation (computing) , scheduling (production processes) , constraint (computer aided design) , computer science , environmental science , agricultural engineering , mathematical optimization , mathematics , engineering , geometry , programming language , operating system
Harvest scheduling models often include maximum harvest opening size constraints, a restriction generally imposed for legal or policy reasons. The maximum harvest opening size restriction can greatly affect the spatial layout of the forest, with the dispersed harvesting increasing forest fragmentation. Because they can offset the negative impacts of maximum harvest opening size constraints, mature patch size constraints, which require a certain amount of the forest to be in patches meeting both minimum size and age requirements, have also been included in these models. This paper looks at the economic and spatial effects of ten harvest scheduling formulations with these two constraint sets on 21 hypothetical forest landscapes. Analyses of their age‐class distributions, border distributions, and patch size distributions at the end of a 60‐year planning horizon confirm that maximum harvest opening size constraints tend to fragment forest landscapes and that mature patch constraints can significantly reduce these effects.