Estimation of Optimal Harvest Volume for the Long-term Forest Management Planning using Goal Programming

摘要

To facilitate the sustainable forest management, Forest Service in Korea has assigned 2.9 million hectare forests as 'intensive management forests' and encouraged local governments to develop a strategic management plan for their forests. One of problems for the sustainable forest management in Korea is the skewed distribution of forest age classes. Currently the majority of forestlands in Korea is occupied by age classes III and IV. In this study, we intended to find an optimum harvest volume, which enable one to make the intensive management forest in Youngdong-Gun evenly distributed for the age classes and allow an even harvest volume through a 50 year time horizon. To develop an optimization model, we applied the goal programming technique which is adequate for a multi-purpose management planning. The results indicated that it is necessary to harvest 1.2 million cubic meters in each decade to achieve the most stable distribution of age classes for the study site. The harvest volume target resulted from this study would be used in a management planning or an associated policy making process in the future.