Evaluation of forest treatment planning considering multiple objectives

Various tools and techniques are used by environmental managers and planning agencies to make land use decisions that balance different and often competing goals. Multiple goals, or objectives, are generally challenging to address because there is likely no single optimal solution, but rather a range of possible Pareto (or tradeoff) solutions. Considerable attention has focused on software and approaches that rely on heuristic methods to generate solutions for land use planning problems with multiple objectives. While fast and accessible, there remain uncertainties about the quality of solutions obtained by these heuristic methods and whether they are indeed meeting the needs of environmental managers. This paper explores forest treatment planning for wildfire risk mitigation seeking to balance multiple objectives when the spatial pattern of treatment is restricted. Solution quality of one widely employed forest planning tool is evaluated (using measures of completeness, inferiority, and maximum gap) under a range of geographic settings and problem sizes. The findings indicate that obtained solutions are suboptimal, and fail to represent the full spectrum of tradeoffs possible.