Webinar: Integrating wildlife habitat in long-term forest management planning

The main objective of a forest management planning effort is to identify how and when to schedule the management activities of the forest over a long period of time to maintain the ecological and economic sustainability of forest ecosystems. In other words, what are the optimum management treatments and when to apply them to different stands to achieve the landowner’s long-term objectives across the landscape? 

 

Conventionally, forest planning models have focused on the production of just one objective or ecosystem service (e.g., timber production). If the landowner’s interest is to tackle multiple objectives, e.g., timber production and wildlife habitat conservation, the easiest way to approach these problems is to define different scenarios optimizing the main objective (e.g.,, timber production) and assess the impacts of those harvest levels on the secondary objective (e.g., wildlife habitat). With this approach, management decisions are not made by integrating both objectives, but rather by assessing the impacts after the harvest decision has been made. 

 

In this seminar, Irene De Pellegrin with the University of Minnesota's Department of Forest Resources will take a deeper dive into how to integrate wildlife objectives into the forest management planning process, defining a harvest-scheduling model that accounts for habitat conservation of keystone wildlife species in Minnesota.