Forest policy and decision-makers are challenged by the need to balance the increasing demand for multiple ecosystem services while addressing the impacts of natural disturbances (e.g., wildfires, droughts, wind, insect attacks) and global change scenarios (e.g., climate change) on its potential supply. This challenge motivates the development of a framework for incorporating concerns with a wide range of ecosystem services in multiple criteria management planning contexts. Thus, the paper focused on both the analysis of the current state-of-the art research in forest management planning and the development of a conceptual framework to accommodate various components in a forest management process. On the basis of a thorough recent classification of forest management planning problems and the state-of-the-art research, we defined the key dimensions of the framework and the process. The emphasis was on helping to identify how concerns with a wide range of ecosystem services may be analyzed and better understood by forest ecosystem management planning. This research discusses the potential of contemporary management planning approaches to address multiple forest ecosystem services. It highlights the need for a multi-level perspective and appropriate spatial resolution to integrate multiple ecosystem services. It discusses the importance of methods and tools that may help support stakeholders’ involvement and public participation in hierarchical planning processes. The research addresses the need of methods and tools that may encapsulate the ecological, economic, and social complexity of forest ecosystem management to provide an efficient plan, information about tradeoffs between ecosystem services, and the sensitivity of the plan to uncertain parameters (e.g., prices, climate change) on time.

Purpose of Review: The spatial forest planning concept has evolved as an essential component of the forest management planning process. The development of both exact and heuristic modeling techniques as analytical solution techniques have seen significant progress in application to spatial forest planning over the last two decades. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive review of the current state of spatial forest planning in both scope and depth, focusing on different approaches and techniques used, the challenges faced, and the potential future developments. For that purpose, we conduct a world-wide literature review and an extensive analysis of the status and trends over the past two decades in spatial forest planning. Recent Findings: The literature review indicates that recent advancements have led to the development of new algorithms/formulations for addressing spatial constraints in forest planning with exact solution techniques. Nevertheless, it highlights further that heuristic techniques are still widely used, especially in large real-world problems that encompass multiple ecosystem services and constraints. Besides the provisioning services, there has been a noticeable increase in the proportion of regulating, supporting and cultural services addressed in objective functions of forest management planning models. Adjacency/green-up relationships, opening size, core area, wildlife habitat and the spatial arrangement of fuel treatments have been considered as indicators to address the provision of these services and spatial forest problem. Summary: We pinpoint persistent challenges to using exact modeling techniques to address large real problems with multiple ecosystems services. We highlight further that determining the optimal combination and values of heuristic parameters and assessing the quality of heuristic solutions remains a central challenge. Finally, we highlight the potential of artificial intelligence to overcome computational obstacles to the application of both exact and heuristic techniques to spatially explicit forest management planning.

Background and Objectives: Forest-based bioeconomies have been adopted as the national forest strategies in many European countries. However, in the Czech Republic, the bioeconomy has not been officially included in national policies. The main objective of the paper was to review the current forest policy in the Czech Republic in meeting the purposes of the European forest-based bioeconomy. To better understand the opportunities and shortcomings of the forest strategy and the implementation of a forest-based bioeconomy in the country, a comparison study in the Czech Republic and Germany was also carried out. Methods: A review of the forest strategies was done based on the following research questions: (1) How are the bioeconomy principles and priorities present in the Czech National Forest Programme (NFP) as reflected in the EU Forest Strategy, and how does the Czech forest strategy compare to that in Germany? (2) What is the situation concerning the national wood production and consumption to understand the opportunities and challenges of the bioeconomy implementation in the studied countries? Results: The Czech NFP was approved following the pan-European process for the protection of forests in Europe; therefore, it does not directly reflect the 2012 bioeconomy principles, although most of these approaches have been included in this strategy. Different national measures in two studied countries were revealed to achieve the objectives of the forest bioeconomy. The primary contribution from the Czech forestry to the bioeconomy is sustainable forest-based products. A forest bioeconomy is also targeted at mitigating climate change by providing forest biomass for bioenergy. Conclusions: The Czech Republic is in the midst of the adoption process of the bioeconomy strategy. The main challenges faced by the forest-based sector in the country is to fulfil the demand for sustainable forest biomass and high value-added products. Multisectoral collaboration, business diversification, and education for public consumers are needed to increase the growth and job opportunities of the bioeconomy sector in rural areas.

Climate and social changes place strong demands on forest managers. Forest managers need powerful approaches and tools, which could help them to be able to react to the rapidly changing conditions. However, the complexity of quantifying forest ecosystems services as well as the complexity of current decision theories, technologies and operation research methods, complicate the creation of one general tool. The continuous research and development in this area is an indispensable part of the success of adaptive management as well as the sharing of knowledge and information between research teams around the world. The Community of Practice of Forest Management Decision Support Systems provides a platform for broad discussion among scientists, researchers as well as forest professionals. This special issue provides papers which resulted from a conference session of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations’ (IUFRO) 125th Anniversary Congress in Freiburg, Germany in 2017. The joint sessions and other meetings (and resulting publications) are appropriate opportunities for knowledge sharing on these important methods and systems for protecting and managing forest ecosystems in the future.

The paper shows how the aspects of uncertainty in spatial harvest scheduling can be embedded into a harvest optimization model. We introduce an approach based on robust optimization that secures better scheduling schematics of the decision maker while eliminating a significant portion of uncertainty in the decisions. The robust programming approach presented in this paper was applied in a real management area of Central Europe. The basic harvest scheduling model with harvest-flow constraints was created. The uncertainty that is assessed here is due to forest inventory errors and growth prediction errors of stand volume. The modelled results were compared with randomly simulated errors of stand volume. The effects of different levels of robustness and uncertainty on harvest-flow were analyzed. The analysis confirmed that using the robust approach for harvest decisions always ensures significantly better solutions in terms of the harvested volume than the worst-case scenarios created under the same constraints. The construction of a mathematical model as well as the methodology of simulations are described in detail. The observed results confirmed obvious advantages of robust optimization. However, many problems with its application in forest management must still be solved. This study helps to address the need to develop and explore methods for decision-making under different kinds of uncertainty in forest management.