Luis Diaz-Balteiro

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | UPM · School of Forest Engineering and Natural Resources

Linear programming models have been used in forest management planning since the 1960s. These models have been formulated in three basic ways: Models I, II, and III, which are defined by the sequences of management unit states represented by the variables. In Model I, variables represent sequences of states from the beginning of the planning horizo...

Since the 1960s, forest planners have used linear programming models to develop management plans for large, forested areas. Hundreds of academic papers have presented such models, incorporating multiple objectives, a growing diversity of management interventions, and uncertainty, among other things. Three basic ways to formulate these models have b...

In forestry, although the so-called nature-based climate solutions have usually been focused on the calculation of carbon captured in new afforestation projects, it should be noted that the increase in carbon associated with improvements in their management (Improved Forest Management) can also be computed. This type of carbon is not usually integr...

Multifunctional forest management is a strategy increasingly shared by forest managers. In the drive towards multifunctionality, different policies are widely being developed to integrate timber production and biodiversity conservation into forest management. To achieve this aim, both segregated and integrated approaches have been used. Segregated...

Linear programming formulations of forest ecosystem management (FEM) problems proposed in the 1960s have been adapted and improved upon over the years. Generating management alternatives for forest planning is a key step in building these models. Global forests are diverse, and a variety of models have been developed to simulate management alternat...

The demand for quality wild fungi has been continually increasing over the past few years. However, problems arise when modelling this demand, owing to the difficulty of finding precise data on their origin or value chain. Nor is there any reliable information on the preferences of consumers; therefore, in this work, we aimed to analyse the influen...

We estimated stand level timber investment returns for a range of 16 countries and 47 planted species/management regimes in 2020, using capital budgeting criteria, at a real discount rate of 8%, without land costs. Plantation management financial returns were estimated for the principal plantation countries in the Americas—Brazil, Argentina, Urugua...

The correct aggregation of stakeholders’ preferences is a vital aspect of solving problems associated with natural resources. In fact, there is no one solution that permits the incorporation of those preferences into techniques that, in turn, address multiple objectives in the management of those resources. In this context, this work aims to assign...

By developing products derived from materials included in what is nowadays called bioeconomy, the wood products industry is today receiving considerable attention for its potential to provide more environment-friendly materials. At the same time, this and other industries are transforming to obtain more circular production systems. This study aims...

A la hora de plantear un libro dedicado a los proyectos de repoblaciones, resulta imprescindible comentar las principales herramientas del análisis económico y financiero que se deben incorporar a un proyecto de estas características. Este capítulo se centra fundamentalmente en estos instrumentos, planteándolos desde el punto de vista de un centro...

The conflicts that arise between natural resources consumption and the desire to preserve them make the multicriteria decision theory necessary. Brazil, one of the 10 largest timber producers globally, uses optimization models that represent the growth of forests integrated with decision support systems. Brazilian forest plantation managers often f...

Since its origin in the eighteenth century, in the forestry field, the concept of sustainability has evolved considerably by increasing its level of complexity. This increase in complexity is due mainly to the integration of the concept and measurement of the degree of sustainability of a natural system into a multifunctional context. Besides this,...

This Special Issue of Sustainability aims to take a step in the direction of linking the conceptualization and measurement of the degree of sustainability of a natural system with the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) theory. Thus, we present a collection of ten papers dealing with recent theoretical and applied issues of the so-called new sust...

In recent years modern societies have attached a multifunctional requirement to the use of renewable resources, making their optimal sustainable management more complex. In the last decades, in many cases, this complexity is addressed by formulating management models with the help of the concepts and methods belonging to the well-known multicriteri...

The sustainable management of the environment and its embedded resources is one of the most important, if not the major challenge of the 21st century, which demands from current science and technology the development of a scientifically sound conceptual framework that is implementable from an operational point of view for properly tackling this imp...

Spatially explicit, tactical forest planning is a necessary but challenging task in the management of plantation forests. It involves harvest scheduling and planning for road access and log transportation over time and space. This combinatorial problem can be formulated into the fixed-charge transportation problem (FCTP), in which the sum of fixed...

We estimated timber investment returns for 22 countries and 54 species/management regimes in 2017, for a range of global timber plantation species and countries at the stand level, using capital budgeting criteria, without land costs, at a real discount rate of 8%. Returns were estimated for the principal plantation countries in the Americas—Brazil...

Natural landscapes are increasingly under anthropogenic pressures, and concern about human impacts on wildlife populations is becoming particularly relevant in the case of natural areas affected by roads. The expansion of road networks is considered among the main factors threatening biodiversity due to their potential for disturbing natural ecosys...

The integration of biodiversity into forest management has traditionally been a challenge for many researchers and practitioners. First, we have provided a survey of forest management papers that use different Operations Research (OR) methods in order to integrate biodiversity objectives into their planning models. One hundred and seventy-nine refe...

Esta comunicación analiza el turno óptimo para esta especie para el modelo selvícola EN1, de producción de madera de trituración. Se han utilizado para ello las tablas de producción obtenidas para E. nitens, considerando tres calidades de estación (IS=18m, IS=14m y IS=10m a edad de referencia de 6 años). En cuanto a la propiedad se considera: parti...

Following a new analytical orientation, this paper proposes an approach for investigating group versus individual trade-offs in general voting situations. From specific particularizations of a general family of p-norms, three social decision rules have been derived. These rules trigger three different systems of weights in the voting system. Once t...

Since its origins, the idea of sustainability has always been linked to forest management. However, nowadays, sustainable forest management has usually been approached by defining a set of criteria and indicators. This paper aims to address sustainability in forest management including a set of criteria encompassing the most common decisions: wheth...

Background The potentially negative effects of timber harvesting on biodiversity and habitat conservation leads to the consideration of a wide range of restrictions to forest logging in natural areas. In particular, high noise levels produced by forest machinery present a challenge to developing sustainable forest management plans. The Cinereous vu...

Spatial statistics indices used in this study. Source: McGarigal & Marks, 1995.

Outline of the three-step proposed strategy.

Raw data. Centroid (Group 0) and stands (Group 1) orographical data.

Raw Data Scenario 1. Landscape, orographical and forest data at each stand’s centroid point in Scenario 1.

Raw Data Scenario 2. Landscape, orographical and forest data at each stand’s centroid point in Scenario 2.

The degree of complexity in forest management has increased in the last few decades, not only due to the inclusion of specific new issues (e.g., climate change, social protection, etc.), but also because these new, as well as classic, issues have to be dealt with in a context characterised by multiple conflicting criteria that are evaluated by diff...

Forest managers have struggled to develop several measures to mitigate the impacts of logging operations on soil erosion. Two measures have consisted in considering slope restrictions and limiting the size of clearcut harvest areas in timber harvest scheduling models by means of adjacency constraints. However, these constraints build on an external...

Forest-management planning could be addressed at various temporal scales, namely strategic and tactical scales. The former are associated with extended temporal horizons, whereas the latter focus on shorter periods of time and typically encompass further spatial requirements. On the other hand, in most forestry scenarios, the existence of multiple...

Abstract National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to the ecosystem services, products, incomes and environmental assets of a country. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply spatially-explicit extended accounts that incorporate a novel environmental income indicator, which we test in the forests of Andalusia (Spain). Extende...

For the past few decades, the integration of biodiversity conservation into forest management has constituted an important challenge, since the new forest management models should make conservation objectives compatible with production issues. In many countries, timber production is no longer the main ecosystem service provided, thus other aspects...

Examples of large-scale restoration programs to recover ecosystem services are now common in many countries, and governments are assuming ambitious forest restoration targets. Given the increasing investment of time, effort, and money in restoration, there is an urgent need to develop monitoring programs to assess restoration effectiveness. Some co...

There is an important body of literature using multi-criteria distance function methods for the aggregation of a battery of sustainability indicators in order to obtain a composite index. This index is considered to be a proxy of the sustainability goodness of a natural system. Although this approach has been profusely used in the literature, it is...

Anthropogenic noise is a growing ubiquitous and pervasive pollutant as well as a recognised stressor that spreads throughout natural ecosystems. However, there is still an urgent need for the assessment of noise impact on natural ecosystems. This article presents a multidisciplinary study which made it possible to isolate noise due to road traffic...

The application of optimization methods to forest management has given rise to a successful line of investigation in recent decades. However, there have been few publications associated with the application of these techniques to the management of industrial forest plantations (those with short or medium rotations, always less than 50 years), which...

Forest certification is a practice that has been consolidated worldwide in recent years as a result of certification often being associated with sustainability. However, there is not much research available on the perception of stakeholders and experts of that association. This study evaluates how key stakeholders relate certification to sustainabi...

National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to a country ́s ecosystem services, products, total income and environmental asset variations. To overcome these shortcomings, wedevelop a spatially-explicit extended ecosystem accounting framework, which we test intheMediterranean forests of Andalusia (Spain). This framework goes beyon...

Urban parks play an outstanding role in cities in protecting their inhabitants from the stress of daily life. However, these green areas might be affected by noise pollution, thus reducing their social function. The aim of this study was twofold: (i) to characterize the soundscape of the Retiro Park, an urban forest park located in Madrid (Spain),...

Shrubland management has not traditionally been considered in forest planning. However, some of these forest systems can provide economic benefits due to both the use of biomass and the high production of marketable edible fungi associated with the shrub species. This is the case for Cistus ladanifer, a species widely distributed in the Mediterrane...

Aim of study: This paper objective focuses on the contribution of multifunctional natural forest silviculture, incorporating both private and public product managements, to forest and woodland economics. Area of study: Spain and California (USA). Material and methods: This conceptual article has developed a critical revision of the existing liter...

En tratamientos de monte bajo, es común asumir un turno óptimo repetido para los sucesivos ciclos, aunque las diferencias en crecimientos y densidades entre ellos podrían hacer económicamente preferible asumir turnos diferentes. Para analizar esta cuestión, se utiliza la metodología de Faustmann aplicada sobre un modelo de crecimiento de 2006 para...

Hasta hace poco tiempo, los distintos métodos de gestión forestal han estado orientados casi en exclusiva hacia distintas producciones tangibles, dejando a un lado servicios que no disponen de un precio de mercado, como es el caso de la conservación de la biodiversidad. Esto ha conducido a que outputs como la producción de madera hayan ido perdiend...

Desde que el concepto de sostenibilidad se comenzó a popularizar en la Cumbre de Río se ha considerado casi unánimemente que esta idea puede articularse mediante un conjunto de criterios y/o indicadores. Esta orientación ha conducido a un enorme desarrollo a nivel mundial en cuanto a la definición de indicadores de gestión forestal sostenible a dis...

Carbon sequestration has become an important issue in forest management in the light of concerns about global warming. The two methods proposed by IPCC to quantify the net carbon sequestered by trees are based either on the estimation of annual gains and losses of carbon due to the growth of trees and their removals (default method), or on the diff...

Determining the sustainability of a system (e.g. through a criteria and indicators approach) has been the focus of research in many branches of science. Frequently, this research used multiple criteria decision making techniques. In this work, we analyze and critically assess the literature published on these topics. For this purpose, a set of 271...

The coppice regeneration method used to manage eucalypts leads to a simultaneous optimization problem: the manager has to simultaneously define the optimal age in each coppice rotation and the optimal number of coppice rotations for each plantation full cycle. The dynamic nature of the problem justifies the use of methods like dynamic programming i...

Free via Open Access: http://le.uwpress.org/content/93/1/87.full.pdf+html We develop a model that estimates spatially allocated environmental asset values for the simultaneous provision of seven ecosystem services. We examine the effect of heterogeneous spatial and economic factors on asset figures, and identify potential forestry abandonment prob...

Sustainable forest management has been approached on many occasions by defining and subsequently measuring a set of initially accepted indicators. This methodology permits the aggregation of multiple goods and services with heterogeneous characteristics into forest management. However, the calculation of these indicators has usually been static. Wh...

The integration of biodiversity into forest management has traditionally been a challenge for many researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we have provided a survey of forest management papers that use different Operations Research (OR) methods in order to integrate biodiversity objectives into their planning models. One hundred and seventy-n...

We present an approach based on several quantitative techniques to derive a ranking of sustainable Eucalyptus plantations. A list of indicators was defined and applied to a set of heterogeneous Eucalyptus globulus plantations located in the northwest of Spain. These indicators were aggregated into a synthetic index with the help of a binary goal pr...

As forest managers and owners must have precise assessments of sustainability, in this study we have proposed a methodology based on multi-criteria techniques for assessing sustainability in industrial forest plantations and establishing a ranking of these plantations in terms of sustainability. First, we identified and have briefly described a set...

There is a global and growing concern with regard to anthropogenic noiseimpact on wildlife and natural habitats, but it is difficult to find consensus regarding scoping and assessment tools. This study adapts noise mapping procedures, common to most European countries, to a low traffic road (below 1000 vehicles per day) noiseimpact assessment in a...

Global transportation growth causes several disproportionate impacts on the environment as, for instance, noise pollution which is related to negative effects on human health but also to quiet natural areas decline and biodiversity loss. Besides, sound is a component of ecosystems severely threatened by transportation noise disturbance which is rel...

We develop a model for estimating the environmental asset (EA) value of a selection of forest provisioning services that include timber, cork, firewood, pine-nuts and grazing resources and carbon sequestration as a regulating ecosystem service. This EA computing model is applied to a group of 567 silvopastoral farms in Andalusia (Spain). The expect...

A mycological supply function of wild edible fungi is determined by a set of forest and economic variables, among which climate variables stand out. Focusing on wild mushroom picking with commercial value (Lactarius deliciosus (L.) Gray) as an example, the main objective of this paper is to obtain empirical evidence about the impact of meteorologic...

This work aimed to tackle a timber harvest scheduling problem by simultaneously integrating into the analysis two forestry products derived from the same species: the timber and the pine nut. For this purpose, three management scenarios were proposed: two in which each of the productions is maximised separately, and a third mixed where, in each man...

In this study, we propose a procedure for integrating several ecosystem services into forest management by using the well-known multi-criteria approach called goal programming. It shows how interactions with various stakeholders are essential in order to choose the goal programming model applied, as well as some of its basic components (variant, ta...

This chapter deals with the basic principles underlying the optimum economic management of the industrial forest plantations. With this purpose the presentation will start with the introduction of basic concepts of the investment analysis, which will serve as a basis for explaining the tools most usually employed for analysing the profitability of...

The first chapter of the book initially addresses the definition of planted forests, industrial forests and industrial forest plantations. It also contextualizes historically the evolution of the term forest plantations, citing the several international organizations involved and different attempts to satisfy many actors and opinions. Facts and fig...

In this chapter, we propose a procedure base on a multi-criteria framework to address sustainable management in industrial forest plantations. First of all, we propose a strategic timber harvest scheduling problem to define eighteen management alternatives. Next, we take into consideration six sustainability indicators and measure them for each man...

This paper proposes a multi-criteria approach that accounts for the risk of fire when determining the optimal rotation of a forest stand that is being managed for both timber production and carbon sequestration purposes. The multi-criteria framework uses in a combined way, multi-objective optimization and compromise programming methods. The propose...

Covers all components of the industrial forest supply chain ranging from modelling techniques to management planning approaches and information and communication technology support. Includes numerical examples as tutorials for the application of management planning approaches. It discusses real-word applications in 26 Management Planning in Action...

Terrestrial ecosystems, such as forestlands and grasslands, provide many ecosystems services, and in most cases these services are provided by working landscapes that also generates relevant manufactured products (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2013). Conventional national accounts for agriculture and forestry activities neglect nonmarket environmental...

In this study a national park soundscape characterisation was contrasted with an economic estimation of the impact of noise pollution on the park visitors’ perception. The main noise sources were identified and the noise-pollution levels were assessed along a pathway that is highly frequented by hikers in a natural park in the mountains of central...