STSM Opportunity USA VDDT Use in PNW National Forest Plans

There is potential for an STSM to study the use of the VDDT DSS for the updating of a group of national forest plans in the US pacific northwest (Washington, maybe Oregon). The purposes of the study would be

1. exploratory/descriptive: simply describe how the tool is used and how its results are integrated into national forest plans
2. Explanatory: build on a few existing cases of the use of other DSS in NFPs (see background below).

Activies would include reviewing documents and interviewing planning professionals at the region headquarters in Portland Oregon and also at the forest offices in northern Washington.

Further background extracted from the FORSYS USA country report:

Each of the 155 national forests is required to have a forest-wide plan and to update it every 15 years. Planning for these lands is unique in that it is governed by the National Forest Management Act, a federal law passed by Congress, and a “planning rule,” a federal regulation derived from the Act by the USDA Forest Service (USFS) as the responsible agency. These plans are intended to provide strategic guidance (management standards, zoning). Before actions on the ground in a national forest are carried out, project-level planning is done. The basic problem structure and requirements are quite similar to forest-wide planning, except for narrower temporal and spatial scales (tactical, stand-level). In recent years, framing of the planning problem has changed from timber supply to “restoration treatments,” which in turn requires more assessment tools for diverse resources and disturbances.

From 1979 to 1996, the USFS required the use of the FORPLAN DSS (and its successor, SPECTRUM), a matrix generator for input to linear programming solvers. Various growth and yield models were used to project management options. Since 1996, there has been a diversification of DSS used. One of SPECTRUM’s enhancements is the ability to define and use state, flow, and accessory variables. These variables enable the simulation of ecological processes and can be used as dynamic constraints in the optimization model. Some forests are still using SPECTRUM, but as part of more ecologically-oriented vegetation analyses (see the Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan case study in Johnson et al. (2007)). In general, however, there has been a trend away from optimization approaches, due to difficulties in representing the complexities of the forest system, and towards more use of simulation tools such as FVS and the VDDT state-transition modeling framework. FVS has a variety of extensions, such as for fire and fuels, insects and disease, and wildlife. Other published DSS applications for national forest planning include HARVEST (Gustafson, Roberts and Leefers 2006), LANDIS (Shifley et al. 2008), and SIMPPLLE (USDA FS 2008; USDOI BLM 2005).