Managing forest biodiversity: A zero–one goal programming approach

A biodiversity characterisation based on forest ecology considerations is proposed. A basic idea underlying the proposed characterisation is that forest diversity, which maintains wildlife species diversity, requires the management of the age structure of the forest landscape. Primarily the measure of diversity used implies the maximisation of the edge contrast between adjacent harvest units. When this characterisation is integrated into a forest management optimisation model, several computational problems arise. Thus, the biodiversity model requires the computation of absolute values as well as the need to deal with infeasible solutions. The paper demonstrates how these difficulties can be overcome by re-formulating the model as a 0/1 goal programming structure. The functioning of the proposed methodology is illustrated with the help of a simple forest management problem.