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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.
Unit 4.04.04 focuses on the development and application of new methods and tools for efficiently and effectively managing forests. An objective of this unit is to facilitate interaction, dissemination and exchange of new models, methods and technological innovations to address sustainable forest management scheduling 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. Sustainable forest ecosystem management scheduling 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 30 years have enabled substantial changes in the practice of forest management. There is a wide experience of developing and applying management science approaches and computerized decision-support tools for sustainable forest management.
Key to further innovation and success of sustainable forest management scheduling 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 sustainable forest management scheduling namely: (1) operational, tactical and strategic forest management decision analysis, (2) assessment and analysis of forestry projects, (3) economic and environmental impact assessment of forestry projects and programs, (4) decision analysis as a forest policy tool, (5) participatory forest resources decision making and collaborative planning, (6) methodologies for regional and national forestland use planning and (7) the development of both undergraduate and graduate level forest resources management and economics courses.
