Managing Forest Ecosystems16- Decision Support for Forest Ma ...

Annika Kangas

• 30 november 2010
• 9789048177271

Samenvatting:

The goal of Kangas, Kangas and Kurttila's Decision Support for Forest Management is to provide students and researchers with a toolbox of methods for approaching the different planning situations that may arise in practice. It draws together a wide range of methods used in planning forest management regimes and presents a systematic overview of current methodological approaches.

While earlier books concerning forest planning have tended to focus on linear programming, economic aspects, or specific multi-criteria decision aid tools, this book provides a much broader range of tools to meet a variety of planning situations. The methods themselves cover a range of decision situations – from cases involving single decision makers, through group decision making, to participatory planning. They include traditional decision support tools, from optimization to utility functions, as well as methods that are just gaining ground in forest planning – such as problem structuring methods and social choice theory.

Including examples which illustrate the application of each technique to specific management planning problems, the book offers an invaluable resource for both researchers and advanced students specializing in management and planning issues relating to forestry.

This book has been developed as a textbook of decision support methods for s- dents and can also serve as a handbook for practical foresters. It is based on the research we have carried out and lectures we have given over the past years. We have set out to present all the methods in enough details and examples that they can be adopted from this book. For researchers who need more details, references are given to more advanced scienti c papers and books. In this book, theories of decision making and the methods used for forestry - cision support are presented. The book covers basics of classical utility theory and its fuzzy counterparts, exact and heuristic optimization method and modern mul- criteria decision support tools such as AHP or ELECTRE. Possibilities of analyzing and dealing with uncertainty are also brie y presented. The use of each method is illustrated with examples. In addition to decision aid methods, we present the basic theory of participatory planning. Both hard and soft methods suitable for partici- tory or group decision analysis are presented, such as problem structuring method and voting. The criticism towards decision theory is also covered. Finally, some real-life examples of the methods are presented. Annika Kangas Department of Forest Resource Management University of Helsinki Jyrki Kangas Metsahallitus .. Mikko Kurttila University of Joensuu v Acknowledgements Manyresearchersandstudentshavehelpedusbyreviewingchapters,suggesting- provements and even checking our example calculations. We would like to ackno- edgethesereviewers,Ms.AnuHankala,M.Sc.TeppoHujala,M.Sc.AnnuKaila,Dr.