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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Forest Research is the property of Canadian Science Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Forest Research is the property of Canadian Science Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Forest Research is the property of Canadian Science Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many of the intrinsic facets of forest planning are surrounded by uncertainty. Decision-makers strive to improve their understanding of the sources of uncertainty and their impact on the decision-making process. However, uncertainty is rarely integrated into real-world forestry applications or into decision support tools used in forest planning problems. To identify the needs, interests, and challenges of managing uncertainty in forest planning, we interviewed forestry professionals. All the interviewees indicated the positive potential of a tool that could address some facets of uncertainty. Additionally, we conducted a review of the most recent literature on this topic to understand current hot topics and future trends that could help address real-world challenges. This study highlights the next steps to incorporate uncertainty into the decision support systems for forest planning. However, to strengthen the bond between the practical needs of forestry professionals and the theoretical approaches proposed by recent literature, more effort should be placed on defining terminology and formulating a theoretical framework for uncertainty analysis. This will provide the forestry community with a common language and typology, help increase its general understanding, and improve communication between forestry researchers, forestry professionals, and other stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing a plan of action for the future use of forest resources requires a way to predict the development of the forest through time. These predictions require the use of inventory data and growth models that contain a large number of uncertainties. These uncertainties impact the quality of the predictions, and if not accounted for, they can lead to the selection of a suboptimal management plan. To account for and manage the uncertainties and associated risk, we have explored the use of stochastic programming. Stochastic programming can integrate uncertainty into the optimization process by solving the problem for a large number of potential scenarios of the forests future development. The selection of an appropriately sized set of scenarios involves a trade-off between tractability issues and problem representation issues. In this paper, an analysis of the trade-offs is conducted. Two cases are studied, one in which only the uncertainty of the inventory data is included and a second in which both growth model and inventory data uncertainties are included. The impact of increasing the number of scenarios on the problem representation is examined through a simple even-flow problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Forest Research is the property of Canadian Science Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Forest Research is the property of Canadian Science Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)