ForesTIM: Evaluating plantation forest land management by identifying unsustainable practices

Summary

Sustainability has become a key issue in plantation forest management and measures of such are required for both forest land management and planning. The task of developing criteria and indicators (C&I) for sustainability assessment in Australia has been started through the “Montreal Process”. However, this is likely to be a long-term process and in the meantime forest land management decisions with environmental impact still have to be made.

The ForesTIM method outlined in this paper is a “management- based” approach to land evaluation with the aim of aiding forest planners in strategic decision-making on land management. ForesTIM helps planners identify those land management practices that are likely to cause, and those that are likely to prevent long-term or potentially irreversible damage to the land resource. Land management recommendations and best land management practice guidelines are the end result of ForesTIM.

Ultimately, ForesTIM can be used within a holistic forest sustainability assessment framework encompassing the range of scales and factors important to forest sustainability. ForesTIM is currently being developed to operate at the land unit scale, however, by identifying favourable land management regimes across the landscape, enterprise and catchment scale analyses can be performed. Therefore, ForesTIM is not intended to be a complete answer to achieving sustainable forestry, but it can play an important role in the decision-making process of forest planning.