| Abstract: | Current methods for optimization of stand treatment and forest-wide harvest scheduling use mathematical programming that presumes perfect information on production, costs, and revenues over long planning periods. These approaches simultaneously optimize harvest for all periods in the planning horizon. In contrast, the method presented here assumes that stand-level planning and harvest scheduling proceed sequentially rather than simultaneously over every period. A backward-recursion dynamic program is used to determine the discounted net value of a wide range of current harvest strategies for each stand class in the forest inventory on the basis of a projected set of optimal treatments for future harvest and regeneration of each stand. The most highly valued strategy is selected if there are no volume constraints. Otherwise, suboptimal harvest alternatives are ranked in order of increasing opportunity cost for increasing or decreasing harvest; constraints met only up to a maximum opportunity cost is also demonstrated. |
