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Addressing multi-use issues in sustainable forest management with signal-transfer modeling

Informally Refereed

Abstract

Management decisions concerning impacts of projected changes in environmental and social conditions on multi-use forest products and services, such as productivity, water supply or carbon sequestration, may be facilitated with signal-transfer modeling. This simulation method utilizes a hierarchy of simulators in which the integrated responses (signals) from smaller- scale process models are transferred and incorporated into the algorithms of larger spatial- and temporal-scale models of ecological and economic phenomena. Several innovative procedures germane to multi-issue sustainable forest management have been initiated in our signal-transfer modeling development for forests of the southeastern United States. These developments include response surface interpolation for multi-factor signal-transfer, use of loblolly pine modeling to infer the growth of other southern pines, determination of soil nutrient limitations to productivity, multivariate clustering as a spatial basis for defining land units relevant to forest management, and variance propagation through the modeling hierarchy. Algorithms for larger scale phenomena are shown to constrain the variance introduced from a smaller-scale in a simulation of ambient ozone exposure effects on loblolly pine timber yield. Outputs of forest variables are frequency distributions that may be statistically compared for alternative environmental or management scenarios.

Keywords

Environmental change, Monte Carlo simulation, Multivariate clustering, Site index, Spatial and temporal scaling

Citation

Luxmoore, Robert J.; Hargrove, William W.; Tharp, M. Lynn; Post, W. Mac; Berry, Michael W.; Minser, Karen S.; Cropper, Wendell P., Jr.; Johnson, Dale W.; Zeide, Boris; Amateis, Ralph L.; Burkhart, Harold E.; Baldwin, V. Clark, Jr.; Peterson, Kelly D. 2002. Addressing multi-use issues in sustainable forest management with signal-transfer modeling. Forest Ecology and Management 165 (2002) 295-304
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/4499