Modelling timber harvest in ST-Sim

[colin-daniel]

I had the following question from a user after reading the paper: Daniel et al 2017:
I had one question about STSM. The paper that you sent states that this program is used to test management planning strategies. Does that mean that I have to have a harvest sequence generated through a program like Patchworks first or does STSM schedule harvests along with fire. Just wondering how the harvest component is deal with in the model?

The short answer is that you can do either. With ST-Sim you have two options:

1. You can provide an externally generated time series of harvest cutblocks (as rasters over time). These can be generated a-priori or dynamically within a run. note that generating a harvest schedule dynamically by calling an external program such as Patchworks at each timestep of an ST-Sim simulation would be computationally and technically challenging.

2. ST-Sim has a bunch of built-in tools to setup a harvest that is informed by either a forest management plan or a wood supply model. So you can specify various constraints on future harvest (e.g. volume target, cut block size distribution, operability limits, treatments, etc) and it will follow these limits. A key feature of an STSM, however, is it’s stochastic nature. Unlike most wood supply optimization models, which are typically deterministic, ST-Sim allows you to incorporate uncertainty in your timber harvest for those aspects of the harvest for which you are uncertain. In this way ST-Sim can generate a distribution of projections for the future location of harvest cutblocks in response to future uncertainties in such things as fire, climate change, etc. The paper mentioned above gives an example of this approach.

• This topic was modified 5 years ago by colin-daniel.

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