Sustainable forest management: Decision model based on simulation of forest carbon sequestration considering forest products effect

These days, under enormous pressure to reduce carbon emissions, the carbon emissions from forest development and the production of wood products need to be curbed. On this ground, it is an urgent need to create ways to develop carbon sequestration. First of all, we developed a Self-Suppressing Resource Competition Model considering the influence of forest management plans on trees, in order to simulate the competition and growth of various tree species in the forest. Then for their products, we used the Exponential Normal Distribution to simulate their life cycle to estimate their carbon sequestration in a long time precisely. For the management plan, we defined it as a decision vector V, which indicates the detailed harvesting decisions and afforestation plan of 3 trees species of different ages. At last, we developed a One-objective Optimization Model with the only goal of maximizing the carbon sequestration, and solved it using particle swarm algorithm. The results showed that cutting at intervals of 25 years and cutting from the 5th year was the best choice for our test examples, which increased carbon sequestration amount by 30% compared to not cutting forests at all. When various value needs to be considered, we constructed a Comprehensive Forest Value Assessment Model. We collected data for six indicators and divide the indicators into three dimensions, and used the Alternative Cost Method to build the model. Afterward we used the SD-AHP algorithm to set the different values' weight, which includes the needs of the manager and other users. We also construct a Decision-Making system to provide them with usage guidelines (included inputs and outputs). In the first stage, we regarded our comprehensive score as the objective function value of the planning model, took the special situation of the forest not being cut down into account, and gave a reasonable forest management plan that takes the geographic characteristic's effect into account consideration. In the final stage, we analyzed the tansition point. We apply the model to forests of three sizes, large, medium, and small, and the results showed that the harvest interval for 3 optimal management plans is the same ‐‐ 25-years.