Integrated modelling and assessment of forest harvest patterns

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Our forests are under increasing pressure to provide economic security through their ability to provide excellent opportunities for high quality outdoor recreation and tourism. Visual quality is paramount in this goal and any increase in visual quality that costs little in the way of traditional economic inputs via forest harvesting represents a win-win situation. Additionally, ecological health and function of the forest is also a very important topic and has direct impacts on our long term societal resilience to weather short term disturbances such as the recent mountain pine beetle epidemic as well as longer term challenges such as climate change. This program of research will help us to better understand how to balance these factors and therefore better steward the forests of Canada for future generations. By extending the development of a prototype application designed to automatically generate potential harvest designs, and assess them on their ability to meet visual quality targets we hope better understand how a given non-visual (economic or ecological) metric interact with visual quality and identify under which landscape conditions possible synergies or conflicts are likely to occur. This research is organized into 4 phases: (I) implement proposed visual effect parameters and metrics into the software program, (II) conduct a preference study to evaluate visual metrics, (III) identify and include non-visual effect metrics into software, and (IV) conduct a final preference study to identify trade-off values. We are confident that this work will provide a deeper look into specific aspects of harvest design and how they affect visual quality. More than simply investigating the visual effect of a harvest after it has been conducted, by using visualization software, we can begin to understand how a particular harvest may appear on a landscape before the harvest has occurred. This will allow us to iteratively check the ways in which disciplinary experts evaluate the harvest designs which underlie variables of interest in their area and how these relate to visual design. Furthermore, we can move to automate some of the harvest design process with the intention of increasing the visual quality of a harvest given our desire to meet various ecological or economic objectives.