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Membership of IUFRO is open to any institution concerned with the promotion, support or conduct of research related to forests, trees and forest products.
Working Party 4.04.04 focuses on the development and application of new methods and tools for efficiently and effectively address forested landscapes management planning and provision of ecosystem services. An objective of this unit is to facilitate interaction, dissemination and exchange of new models, methods and technological innovations to address landscape-level management planning through workshops, conferences, and publications.
STATE OF KNOWLEDGE
Forests serve a multitude of functions and addressing so many different goals to satisfy the needs of forest owners, the forest industry, and society poses a considerable challenge for forest managers and requires a landscape-level perspective. Landscape management planning involves complex decision-making processes that cannot be addressed by empirical methods only, but requires advanced decision-support tools. Research and development in the past 20 years have enabled substantial changes in the practice of landscape-level management planning for the supply of multiple ecosystem services. There is a wide experience of developing and applying management science approaches and computerized decision-support tools for landscape management.
Key to further innovation and success of landscape management planning is the development and dissemination of research that may target hot topics such as a) the architecture and implementation of decision support systems (DSS), b) the models and methods to support decision-making in DSS, c) the knowledge management techniques in DSS and d) the participatory processes to be supported by DSS.
This will be influential to innovation in several processes within landscape management planning namely: (1) operational, tactical and strategic landscape-level decision analysis, (2) assessment and analysis of landscape management projects, (3) economic and environmental impact assessment of landscape-level projects and programs, (4) decision analysis as a forest policy tool, (5) participatory landscape management decision making and collaborative planning, (6) methodologies for regional and national land use planning and (7) the development of both undergraduate and graduate level landscape management and economics courses.
