The SimForTree Frontends Relatie met en de werking van de begeleidingscommissies

Frontend 1: The Forest-Wood Chain SimForTree The main target groups for this front-end are forest managers, practitioners, wood industry and forestry policy informers.

The Forest-Wood Chain SimForTree Output includes costs and benefits and environmental effects, such as total carbon-budget, yield, economic value, carbon-sequestration, structural diversity, sustainability, impact on diversity and soil water.

The Forest-Wood Chain SimForTree Additional output includes the evaluation of log and wood quality for different wood processing options, s.a. sawing, veneering, wood panel production and new applications like bio-energy production. Input options include detailed management (thinning, pruning…), market and sawmill description. Species parameters and climate scenarios are fixed.

Frontend 2: Environmental SimForTree Here the target is on environmental specialists, policy makers, landscape planners and the educational community. This will be a relatively simple version of the model with reduced input requirements (list of species, list of soils, list of climate scenarios and list of management options).

Environmental SimForTree Output emphasises on a global overview of costs and benefits and environmental effects at a yearly time-step, such as total carbon-budget, yield, economic value, carbon-sequestration, structural diversity, sustainability, impact on diversity and soil water.

Frontend 3: Ecosystem SimForTree Developed for the scientific community, this front-end will emphasise on the understanding of the ecosystem functioning. This version of the model will include full options in input (such as physiological parameters of each species can be changed) and output (daily and halfhourly values of photosynthesis, respiration, evapotranspiration, wood formation, density profiles, branching, carbon storage). This version has all options, but at the cost of longer runtime and increased input requirements.

The SimForTree Frontends Relatie met en de werking van de begeleidingscommissies

Stewardship Council of the Forest-Wood Chain SimForTree The expertise and interest required here is in management practice leading to the desired quantities and qualities of wood. The key stakeholders are: NGO’s, government agencies, wood federation… individual companies

Stewardship Council of the Environmental SimForTree The expertise and interest here is in management practice leading to different levels of environmental and social performance of the multifunctional forest. Key stakeholders are: government agencies, NGOs, environmental consultants, policy makers, research institutes

The SimForTree Frontends Relatie met en de werking van de begeleidingscommissies

Using participatory decision techniques that are based on multi-criteria analysis (MCA), the stewardship councils will be involved in the weighing and ranking of forest functions. This way they contribute to the development of the integrated decision-making platform that should be capable of optimizing management scenarios and solving every multi-interest or multi-function problem presented to the front-ends.

The experts seating in the stewardship councils will express their individual preferences and an integrated choice or decision will result. This objective decision-making process will be incorporated into the model. Moreover, this approach will allow to test the robustness of the model and to validate its practical utility.