Adaptive forest management system for SFM-oriented timber harvest strategies in Japanese plantations

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Dealing with the sophisticated issues of integrating forest resources management with environmental, and social values and objectives in a sustainable manner requires a more holistic and spatial approaches than has been traditionally applied to managing forest ecosystem condition at a stand level. By taking a landscape perspective, combined with improved analytical tools to support the consensus-based management decision-making, benchmarking forest management practices to meet the adequate scale or level of potential impacts caused by silvicultural and harvesting activities might be realized. The object of this research was to discuss the development of a GIS-based spatial decision support system combined with image processing facility (raster type GIS system, IDRISI 32) and a harvest schedule/allocation model for landscape perspective concerns (HARVEST). GIS has now made it possible to incorporate spatial components into harvest schedule/allocation planning and simulation models. In some cases, the modeling capabilities of a particular GIS may be used directly to aid decisions about timber harvesting ; in other cases, an external model is linked to a GIS database. HARVEST was designed to predict changes in landscape patterns with spatial attributes resulting from the initial landscape conditions and potential timber harvest activities. Application potential at two case study forests in Mie and Shiga Prefecture was showed through examples of predicting these changes combined with technical opportunities, constrains, and trade-off. The outcome (the resulting patterns of forest openings and stand age distributions) also provided opportunities of visual feedback. This approach would enable resource managers to design and demonstrate the long-term conservation outlook of forest resources under alternative management strategies geared to multiple economic, environmental, and social objectives.