Temporal and spatial harvesting of irregular systems of parcels

Spatial management issues have assumed a central position in planning for forest ecosystems in the United States on both public and private lands. The arrangement of management activities, especially harvesting activities, can often have adverse impacts on other neighboring areas of the forest. Thus, spatially explicit programming models, which can account for or prevent certain arrangements of activities or land allocations through the use of harvest adjacency constraints, have received considerable attention in the literature. The need for spatial specificity in programming models has led to the development of integer programming or mixed integer programming models. Given that integer programming problems are often viewed as a difficult class of problems to solve, heuristic solution methods have most often been used to solve spatially constrained forest management models. In this paper, a discrete (0–1) integer programming model that maximizes harvested timber volume over a multiperiod time horizon subj...