Computer Applications in Sustainable Forest Management

Forests provide goods and services essential to human societies and the natural environment, but they are disappearing faster today than ever before. What should forestry do in the information era? How can we use computer technologies to better manage forests in a sustainable manner? Computer Applications in Sustainable Forest Management provides critical information needed for forestry professionals to address such questions. Computer Applications in Sustainable Forest Management presents state-of-the-art computer applications in a variety of specialty areas of forestry, including inventory, remote sensing, information management, modelling and visualization, biometrics, forest and harvest planning, bioeconomics and marketing, and decision science for management. This book emphasizes integration, or collaborative use, of computer technologies across different disciplines through interdisciplinary research and development in North America, China, and Europe. It also offers important new insights on how to continue advancing computational technologies in forest management to better achieve the basic goal of sustainable forest management. This book will be a valuable technical resource for resource managers, planners, administrators, researchers, educators, graduate students, and senior undergraduate students in the field of forestry. Case studies demonstrate integration of, or collaboration among, multiple computer applications for sustainable forest management.

• Core technologies.- High-spatial-resolution remote sensing.- Active remote sensing.- Forest information systems.- Road and harvesting planning and operations.- Forest simulation models.- Visualization with spatial data.- Computer-aided decision making.- Bioeconomic and market models.- Synthetic applications.- Digital forestry in the wildland-urban interface.- Linking multiple tools: an american case.- Linking multiple tools: a chinese case.- Conclusions.- From data to sustainable forests.