Developing forest land management scenarios in the Pacific Northwest

The Challenges

How might different forest management practices yield different results over time? How can the timing and location of specific harvest activities be planned around timber prices and logging costs? What are the financial implications of delaying harvests to take advantage of potential carbon markets? This type of intelligence has, until now, depended on complex management systems and detailed data available only to the largest forest products companies.

Our Approach

Ecotrust is using Madrona to develop software that will give all Oregon and Washington land owners and managers forest management scenario planning capacity in a secure web-based environment. Managers will log-in to their private account and input information about their properties,including forest stands, species mix and age classes. They’ll then choose from a wide array of predefined management options that represent different objectives or define their own objectives. The tool delivers feedback on how a given scenario might pay off over the next hundred years in terms of timber harvests and financial returns as well as ecosystem-based metrics.

Notable Features

• Ability to identify properties on a map, upload stand-specific data, designate management actions at the stand level and explore different scenarios for a given property.
• Integration with Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) growth-and-yield modeling software
• Access to detailed, site specific forest composition and structure data based on the U.S. Forest Service Inventory (FIA) Analysis
• Bulk data loading capability
• Wide array of predefined management options
• Ability to define scenarios for timber prices (per board foot) and carbon prices (per ton)
• Rich visualizations including graphs of timber volume, carbon stored and financial return as well as maps of standing volumes.

Contact

For more information, contact Mike Mertens at - 503-467-0775.