ECOPLAN - sustainable, long-term forest management

ECOPLAN is a decision support tool for sustainable, long-term forestry planning. Tools for long-term forestry planning have traditionally been forest-growth-functions, linear programming tools and analyses in geographical information systems. ECOPLAN has combined some of the most useful existing tools with a new state-of-the art optimisation module. This enables the forester to handle all steps of strategic long-term forestry planning inside one application.

The system uses multi-objective heuristic optimisation to generate treatment plans that as far as possible reflect user preferences regarding objectives and constraints. ECOPLAN handles soft, hard, linear, non-linear, regional and global constraints and objectives. The optimisation is fully integrated in the geographical information system ArcGIS, enabling easy, geographical views of treatment plans.

The Dept. of Optimisation has over the last three years been involved in two research projects where ECOPLAN has been further developed; ECSPLAIN and Ecoplan II. In the project Ecoplan II (2000-2002), founded by the Research Council of Norway, NORSKOG and SINTEF, worked together with the Agricultural University of Norway, GEODATA (the Norwegian distributor of ESRI products) and the Norwegian Forest Owners' Federation to further develop Ecoplan.

In 2003 NORSKOG and SINTEF will be working together to further promote ECOPLAN. Further research and development will also be done on Ecoplan in a research project headed by NORSKOG that will run in 2003 and 2004. This project will focus on economical and environmental profits from long-term forest planning systems.