Integrating Wildfire Resistance And Environmental Concerns Into A More Sustainable Forest Ecosystem Management Approach

Liliana Ferreira^{1, 2*}, Alexandra N. Baptista^{1, 3*}, Jose G. Borges^{4, 5}, Isabel Martins^{2, 4}, Susete Marques^{4, 6} and Miguel Constantino^{2, 7}

• ¹ESTG, Polytechnic of Leiria, Portugal
• ²CMAF-CIO - Centro de Matemática, Aplicações Fundamentais e Investigação Operacional, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
• ³Centro de Investigação em Matemática e Aplicações, Instituto de Investigação e Formação Avançada, Universidade de Évora, Portugal
• ⁴School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal
• ⁵Forest Research Centre and Associate Laboratory TERRA, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal, Portugal
• ⁶Forest Research Centre, Higher Institute of Agronomy, University of Lisbon, Portugal
• ⁷Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

This research aims at presenting landscape management planning methods to help stakeholders select forest ecosystem management plans that may address concerns with wildfire risk and with the environmental impacts of clearcuts. Specifically, we develop mixed integer programming models for spatial optimization that incorporate a wildfire resistance index as well as constraints on the size of clearcut openings. The former is used to enforce a minimum level of resistance to wildfire while the latter limits the size of openings, in each period of the planning horizon. Timber volume even flow is another concern that is also taken into account. This research is applied to the Zonas de Intervenção Florestal (ZIF) de Paiva and de Entre-Douro e Sousa (ZIF_VS) that are located in northwestern Portugal.