Integrating biodiversity into forest management planning and decision-making

In this paper, an approach is presented for incorporating biological diversity into strategic forest management planning. Alternative management strategies are evaluated with respect to biodiversity using Saaty’s ratio scale estimation method. Biodiversity consists of a variety of components, their importance depending on context, definition and the objectives of the decision-maker in question. In this study, biodiversity is decomposed into three characteristics: species richness, rarity and vulnerability of the species. Weights of the components of biodiversity are assessed on the grounds of pairwise comparisons between the importance of the components, made by an expert on conservation biology. Maximizing biodiversity is added as an objective to a decision hierarchy of a planning problem of multiple-use forestry. The weight of biodiversity, in relation to other objectives, is determined based on the preferences of the decision-maker. A case study is reported where biodiversity is integrated into forest management planning. The main problems in the application of the presented approach include, primarily, the lack of general agreement on operational definition of biodiversity, and, secondly, the lack of objective knowledge for evaluating decision alternatives with respect to components of biodiversity.