The role of uncertain forest data in a hierarchical forest planning setting with misaligned objectives

Abstract

Forest planning is vital for ensuring objective fulfilment for decision-makers. Forest-owning companies often organise their planning in a hierarchy of separate stages (i.e., strategic, tactical, and operational planning). The objectives for the strategic stage are generally to maximise net present value and long-term harvest levels without threatening the environmental integrity of the forests. However, in the subsequent stages of the planning hierarchy, with a shorter-term focus, the objective is often to minimise costs due to budgetary constraints. These misaligned objectives introduce a dilemma, especially when considering that decisions are typically made using uncertain data. We examined the suboptimality caused by using low-quality forest data in a long-term harvesting planning problem and how this suboptimality is affected by misaligned objectives between the strategic and tactical planning stages. The low-quality forest data were simulated in a Monte Carlo simulation that maintained a real-world structure of errors. The results show that uncertainty in forest data impacts objective fulfilment more than the level of alignment of objectives. However, a high degree of objective alignment performs better than the opposite, regardless of the level of quality of data.