Forest planning at the tactical level

Forest management and planning can involve large tracts of land involving numerous areal units. One approach to plan activities for a forested region over decades involves breaking down decision making into three components: strategic, tactical, and operational. Each level of the management hierarchy can involve the development and application of optimization models. These models typically aid in exploring management alternatives as well as multi-objective tradeoffs. Even though a strategic model can provide support for long term management at a broad scale, solutions may not be feasible at an operational level. Tactical level modeling helps to bridge solutions reached at a strategic level using operational planning information. This paper presents several tactical level planning models that have been developed as a part of a research effort supported by the US Forest Service. These models have been utilized in land use management and planning by the US Forest Service through a specially developed spatial decision support system.