Wildlife planning using FORPLAN: a review and examples from Victorian forests

Summary

Victoria's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is a natural resource agency charged with managing potentially conflicting forest uses and one tool employed for multiple use planning is the linear programming model, FORPLAN. This paper reviews the value of FORPLAN for integrated forest planning and wildlife conservation. As it is currently implemented in Victoria, FORPLAN has serious limitations when used as the sole planning tool for wildlife management. This is because there are practical limits on the construction of sufficiently complex models, it cannot model stochastic processes, the minimum spatial resolution of available data is too coarse, and it does not directly use spatial information. Over-confidence in the projections and expectations of models used in planning must be avoided. An array of tools is used for forest planning including FORPLAN, modelling environments of other kinds, iterative research and public participation. A model is implemented in FORPLAN that uses numbers of hollow bearing trees which are potential nest sites rather than yields of different species. Although the model's assumptions are unrealistic, the exercise was useful because a scarcity of data was highlighted in the classification of old forests used for management planning, and in the resource information for mixed species forests. Wildlife biologists and planners must be involved in, and understand the construction of, FORPLAN models. The most important uses of FORPLAN for wildlife planning are to aid the understanding of forest planning problems, to identify which pieces of critical information are not known, and to provide a forum for the statement of assumptions. The ultimate success of FORPLAN will depend on the way it is used to address forest issues.