ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the methodologies most commonly applied to optimize the sustainable use of forest resources, including an explanatory application of each one to certain stages of forest management. The earliest optimization methodology applied to forest planning was linear programming (LP) in the late 1960s, which was used to resolve small or moderate planning problems. LP has been applied to a wide range of problems since the first forest applications, such as finding the harvesting schedule that minimizes yield consequences to more recent applications, such as finding the land acquisition pattern to maximize the area protected. However, as highlighted in the Introduction section, LP has some limitations for its application to optimization problems when neighboring alternatives have to be considered or when the objective function or constraints are not linear, causing other optimization methods to be applied. The chapter concludes with a case of application that incorporates personal preferences to identify the best forest plan.
