Integrating Wildfire Resistance And Environmental Concerns Into A More Sustainable Forest Ecosystem Management Approach
- 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.
Keywords: Forestry management, Mixed integer programming models, Spatial optimization, Wildfire risk, Adjacency constraints
Received: 01 Mar 2023;
Accepted: 05 Jun 2023.
Copyright: © 2023 Ferreira, Baptista, Borges, Martins, Marques and Constantino. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Mx. Liliana Ferreira, ESTG, Polytechnic of Leiria, Leiria, Portugal
Mx. Alexandra N. Baptista, ESTG, Polytechnic of Leiria, Leiria, Portugal