Multi-criteria decision models for forestry and natural resources management


Book Description

Foresters and natural resource managers must balance conflicting objectives when developing land-management plans. Conflicts may encompass economic, environmental, social, cultural, technical, and aesthetic objectives. Selecting the best combination of management uses from numerous objectives is difficult and challenging. Multi-Criteria Decision Models (MCDM) provide a systematic means for comparing tradeoffs and selecting alternatives that best satisfy the decisionmakergass objectives. In recent years, the use of MCDM in forestry and natural resources management has generated a substantial body of literature. This annotated bibliography includes 124 important references ranging from theoretical studies to real-world applications of MCDM.










Decision Support for Forest Management


Book Description

This updated and expanded second edition adds the most recent advances in participatory planning approaches and methods, giving special emphasis to decision support tools usable under uncertainty. The new edition places emphasis on the selection of criteria and creating alternatives in practical multi-criteria decision making problems.




The Analytic Hierarchy Process in Natural Resource and Environmental Decision Making


Book Description

Decision making in land management involves preferential selection among competing alternatives. Often, such choices are difficult owing to the complexity of the decision context. Because the analytic hierarchy process (AHP, developed by Thomas Saaty in the 1970s) has been successfully applied to many complex planning, resource allocation, and priority setting problems in business, energy, health, marketing, natural resources, and transportation, more applications of the AHP in natural resources and environmental sciences are appearing regularly. This realization has prompted the authors to collect some of the important works in this area and present them as a single volume for managers and scholars. Because land management contains a somewhat unique set of features not found in other AHP application areas, such as site-specific decisions, group participation and collaboration, and incomplete scientific knowledge, this text fills a void in the literature on management science and decision analysis for forest resources.







Multi-objective Forest Planning


Book Description

Most of the scientific methods devised for forest planning support timber production ignoring the existence of forest functions other than wood production. Fortunately, the realisation that the forest planning methods available today do not correspond to the needs of today's forestry has activated forest researchers to develop and adopt new methodologies and approaches, which are specifically aimed at multi-objective situations. This book is about the quantitative approach to multi-objective forest planning. The emphasis is on topics that are rather new and not yet systematically applied in forest planning practice. The topics and methodologies discussed in this book include: measurement of preferences, multiple criteria decision analysis, use of GIS to support multi-objective forest management, heuristic optimization, spatial optimisation, and the measurement of non-wood forest outputs. By reading the book, a planning specialist, student or a researcher will get an insight into some of the current developments in forest planning research.




Handbook of Operations Research in Natural Resources


Book Description

Here is the first systematic handbook treatment of quantitative modeling natural resource problems, their allocated efficient use, and societal and economic impact. Andrés Weintraub is the very top person in Natural Resource research. He has selected co-editors who are at the top of the sub-fields in natural resources: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining. The book covers these areas with contributions from researchers on, among others, modeling natural research problems, quantifying data, and developing algorithms.




Multiple Use of Forests and Other Natural Resources


Book Description

In 1996 a major six-year research programme, 'Economic Optimisation of Multiple-Use Forestry and Other Natural Resources' was implemented at Department of Economics and Natural Resources, The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (KVL), Copenhagen. The research is funded by KVL; The Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Research Council; The Danish Research Academy; The Danish Forest and Landscape Institute; The Danish Forest and Nature Agency; and The Danish Environmental Protection Agency. The overall objective of the research programme is to enhance the economic theory of sustainable multiple-use forestry and landscape management planning. Emphasis is on decision-making ! management planning from an economic point of view, the basic criterion being rationality as implemented by application of Operations Research methods with regard to sustainable and multiple use of forests and other natural resources in the landscape. The research programme benefits from collaboration agreements with University of California at Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Oregon State University, Department of Forest Resources. As part of the research programme, a second international conference and workshop was held 6 - 12 August, 1998 at KVL, with the title: '2nd Berkeley-KVL Conference on Natural Resource Management -Design and Implementation of Multiple-Use Management'. This event was financed by The Danish Research Academy. Some of the papers presented were selected for peer-reviewing and subsequent publishing. The outcome is the present book in which no paper has been previously published.




Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in Natural Resource Management


Book Description

Providing useful insights on the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) in natural resource management, this book examines a number of empirical applications for several countries and a variety of natural resources. It is shown that using MCDA in the management of water, forestry, wetland and other natural resources can substantially improve the design and implementation of natural resource and environmental policies. Stakeholder involvement is also an important determinant of successful resource management and MCDA provides a useful and effective framework for getting stakeholders involved in resource management decisions. Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in Natural Resource Management gives in-depth analysis of the potential problems in applying these techniques, including difficulties eliciting required information, lack of suitable measures for environmental variables and the need to develop innovative methods to simplify the use of MCDA.