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The intensification of forest management in Canada has been advocated as a possible solution to the conundrum that increasing demand for conservation areas and increasing pressure for timber production have created. The benefits and disadvantages of intensive forest management in the context of the Canadian boreal forest are unclear and reaching conclusions about its general value from stand analyses may be difficult. In this study, a boreal forest in Ontario has been used to investigate the potential of intensive management to generate financial revenues and meet management constraints on volume flow and old-growth retention. Two aspects of intensive forest management are considered: intensive silviculture and concentrated harvest activities. The plans are generated with a decentralized planning approach based on cellular automata. The results for the case study show that increasing silviculture intensity can help fulfill high timber flow requirements under strict conservation requirements. This comes at the cost of reduced net revenues but from a smaller timber harvesting landbase. The main trade-offs found were those between harvest flow and financial benefits. Clustering both protected areas and harvest operations could help achieve the conservation and timber-related objectives simultaneously by improving the habitat value of conserved areas and decreasing the operational costs in harvested areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we use compromise programming to solve a multiple-objective land use and forest management planning model. Long- and short- (‘fast’) term carbon uptake, maintenance of structural diversity, and economic (net returns to forestry and agriculture) objectives are simultaneously achieved by minimizing the distance between current objective values and the ideal ones. Two distance metrics are used, representing a risk neutral and highly risk-averse decision maker. An application of the model to public forestland and adjacent private agricultural lands in the (boreal) Peace River region of northeastern British Columbia indicates that both short- and long-term carbon uptake, and maintenance of structural diversity, can be achieved only at the high financial costs. Contrary to earlier studies, we also find conflict between both short- and long-term carbon uptakes and maintenance of landscape structural diversity. Targeting short-term carbon uptake results in the greatest deviation from desired structural diversity, although the deviation is somewhat smaller with respect to the long-term carbon uptake goal. Further, risk neutral and risk-averse decision makers will employ significantly different land use and forest management strategies. Finally, the ‘balanced’ strategy (which underachieves attainment of the ‘ideal’ by the same degree for all objectives) attains diversity targets quite closely, but significantly underachieves economic and carbon objectives. Maximization of the weighted sum of objective deviations results in an ‘average’ strategy that performs much better in attaining carbon objectives, but diversity is sacrificed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]