Roulliard D FEMC2007

Ontario's Decision Support System Suite: Integration of Hierarchical Forest Estate Modelling, Landscape Simulation and Landscape Assessment

Dan Roulliard, Ministry of Natural Resources, 70 Foster Drive, Suite 400, Sault Ste. Marie, ON, P6A 6V5 Canada, dan.rouillard@ontario.ca
Peter Henry, Ministry of Natural Resources, 70 Foster Drive, Suite 400, Sault Ste. Marie, ON, P6A 6V5 Canada, peter.d.henry@ontario.ca
Dirk Kloss, Ministry of Natural Resources, 70 Foster Drive, Suite 400, Sault Ste. Marie, ON, P6A 6V5 Canada, dirk.kloss@ontario.ca

Change is constant in forest management. In recent years, the forestry landscape in Ontario has evolved in the face of changing forest policy, legislation, forest inventory and modelling technology and economic environments. These changes require continual evolution of decision support systems that facilitate sustainable forest management.

In Ontario, multi-disciplinary teams of forestry professionals develop forest management plans that address wood supply (harvest levels and locations) and non-timber values. As a result, decision support must promote collaboration and consensus building in the planning process. The Forest Analysis and Modelling Unit of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources has been working hard to promote the advancement of decision support for forest management. A system that combines landscape simulation models, non-spatial linear programming models, spatial heuristic models, and landscape assessment tools is currently being refined for use in forest management planning.

The integration of landscape modelling tools and non-spatial and spatial forest estate models is the primary focus of this presentation. Information flow across the interface of each of these separate modelling systems is an important consideration in the delivery of pragmatic decision support for forest planning. The objective of this interactive poster session is to discuss some of the practical experiences to date and promote sharing of ideas on future development and improvement. Though firmly founded in theory, this poster session is aimed at addressing real problems and issues that arise in the implementation of complex decision support systems for forest management.

This presentation addresses all three conference themes with the focus on the theme of “Decisions need to be made”. The following sub-themes will be addressed in this presentation
-The use of landscape simulation tools to address “more than timber supply” and how this information is integrated into forest-estate modelling
-A hierarchical forest estate modelling approach in Ontario
-The initialization of spatial heuristic algorithms with linear programming solutions.
-How much information is too much?
-Landscape assessment and calibration of the spatial forest estate model.
-Multi-scale spatial landscape assessment techniques based on Landscape Scripting Language (LSL)