Optimal Corridor Connection Considering Forage Reserve within Spatially Constrained Harvest Scheduling under Area Restrictions

Integer programming has been extensively utilized for solving forest management planning or spatially constrained harvest scheduling problems in the past decades. In addition to determining the timing and location of harvest activities over the forest landscape, there are other environmental requirements that call for the setting aside of forest units for conservation purposes. The creation of contiguous forest stands for the protection of wildlife habitat protection can be one of those requirements. A review of existing literature on environmental management shows that a great deal of attention has been paid to nature reserve design in the selection of corridor connection among fragmented habitats. In this paper, we present a new exact optimization model which uses mixed integer programming framework to seek optimal corridor connection and the selection of suitable forage reserves from fragmented habitats, in a spatially constrained harvest scheduling problem under maximum opening size requirements, over space and time. We rely on the concept of the maximum flow problem to deal with spatial aggregation for forest units as well as corridor connection and forage reserve network. The proposed model does not need a priori enumeration and allows for multiple harvests over time. In addition to corridor connection, our novel approach takes into account forage reserves within an exact solution framework of an area restriction model.