Wildlife planning using FORPLAN: a review and examples from Victorian forests

Summary Victoria's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is a natural resource agency charged with managing potentially conflicting forest uses and one tool employed for multiple use planning is the linear programming model, FORPLAN. This paper reviews the value of FORPLAN for integrated forest planning and wildlife conservation. As it is currently implemented in Victoria, FORPLAN has serious limitations when used as the sole planning tool for wildlife management. This is because there are practical limits on the construction of sufficiently complex models, it cannot model stochastic processes, the minimum spatial resolution of available data is too coarse, and it does not directly use spatial information. Over-confidence in the projections and expectations of models used in planning must be avoided. An array of tools is used for forest planning including FORPLAN, modelling environments of other kinds, iterative research and public participation. A model is implemented in FORPLAN that uses numb...

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