On the risk of systematic drift under incoherent hierarchical forest management planning

Abstract

In theory, linkages between hierarchical forest management planning levels ensure coherent disaggregation of long-term wood supply allocation as input for short-term demand-driven harvest planning. In practice, these linkages may be ineffective, and solutions produced may be incoherent in terms of volume and value-creation potential of harvested timber. Systematic incoherence between planned and implemented forest management activities may induce drift of forest system state (i.e., divergence of planned and actual system state trajectories), thus compromising credibility and performance of the forest management planning process. We describe hierarchical forest management from a game-theoretic perspective and present an iterative two-phase model simulating interaction between long- and short-term planning processes. Using an illustrative case study, we confirm the existence of a systematic drift effect, which we attribute to ineffective linkages between long- and short-term planning. In several simulated scenarios, the planning process fails to ensure long-term wood supply sustainability, fails to reliably meet industrial fiber demand over time, and exacerbates incoherence between wood supply and fiber demand over several planning iterations. We show that manipulating linkages between long- and short-term planning processes can reduce incoherence and describe future work on game-theoretic planning process model formulations that may improve hierarchical planning process performance.

The Argentinian forest sector: opportunities and challenges in supply chain management

“…They decompose the problem into convex sub-problems, which also provide a global optimum. The obtained solution shows a low risk of wood supply failure (Paradis et al, 2013 andParadis et al, 2015). In Troncoso et al (2015), a vertical integrated supply chain is presented.…”

An Introduction to Industrial Forestry from a Location Perspective

“…The failure to harvest consistent with the plan will lead to less wood being available over the long term. (see Paradis et al 2013). It is a case of use it or lose it!…”

A hierarchical planning system to assess the impact of operational-level flexibility on long-term wood supply

“…The extent of the impact will, however, vary based on the total harvest at the forest level. A number of studies have demonstrated the linkage between harvest levels and AAC (Armstrong 2004;Paradis et al 2013). Altering silvicultural treatment in a cutblock also changes the total volume harvested.…”