An Extended Unit Restriction Model with Environmental Considerations for Forest Harvesting

Abstract: This paper tackles a forest harvesting problem with adjacency constraints, including additional environmental constraints to protect wildlife habitat and minimize infrastructure deployment costs. To this end, we propose a model to include those considerations during the optimization of the harvest regime of a Mexican forest. The models considered were based on the Unit Restriction Model, a benchmark approach that merges the management units before the optimization process. The resulting model, namely the Green Unit Restriction Model and the benchmark model from the literature, were tested with the forest Las Bayas using information obtained from the SiPlaFor project from the Universidad Juárez. The model derived from was able to solve all tested instances to the optimality. Compared with the model without the additional constraints, the maximum reduction in the objective value observed was 3.23%, caused by reducing the number of stands when they become a protected stand.