HARVEST - Spatial Decision Support Knowledge Portal

HARVEST
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HARVEST is a timber harvest allocation model which can include common wildlife-related constraints (buffers and green-up periods) and can compute and display biodiversity-related metrics about patches, such as interior/edge habitat conditions.

Overview

HARVEST was designed as a strategic research and planning tool, allowing assessment of the spatial pattern consequences of broad timber management strategies. The model is well suited to evaluate alternative strategies, providing comparable predictions about how the alternatives affect the age (or successional stage) distribution of the forest, the spatial distribution of forest interior and edge habitats, and the patch structure of the resulting forest landscape. With HARVEST, the object is not to find a scheduling solution (i.e., determining the order in which individual stands should be harvested), but to assess the spatial pattern consequences of general management strategies. HARVEST has been shown to generate patterns similar to those produced by timber management (Gustafson and Crow 1999).HARVEST simulates harvest practices that reset the age of forested sites to zero. This includes even-aged timber harvest techniques (e.g., clearcutting, shelterwood, seed tree techniques) and uneven-aged group selection. It is not capable of simulating single tree selection because these treatments do not predictably change forest age. ~HARVEST allows the user to interactively simulate harvest by forest type and management area. Management Areas are relatively large, multi-stand areas that are to be managed by specific objectives. The user specifies harvest parameters (such as harvest size, rotation age, green-up interval), for a management area and forest type. The process may be repeated for multiple time steps.

Source Of Description

Gustafson, E.J.and L.V. Rasmussen. 2002. Assessing the Spatial Implications of Interactions Among Strategic Forest Management Options Using a Windows-based Harvest Simulator. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 33:179-196.Gustafson, E.J. and T.R. Crow. 1999. HARVEST: linking timber harvesting strategies to landscape patterns. Pages 309-332 in Spatial modeling of forest landscapes: approaches and applications, Mladenoff, D.J. and W.L. Baker (eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.

URL

http://www.ncrs.fs.fed.us/4153/harvest/harvhome.asp (No Longer Available)

Description Of System Components

The Spec2Harv program is also available for automating the conversion of harvest schedules generated by the Forest Service's Spectrum model into script files that can be used by the HARVEST simulation model to simulate the implementation of the Spectrum schedules in a spatially explicit way. Thus, the optimal harvest schedule from Spectrum is simulated spatially and temporally with HARVEST.~HarvLite is an educational version that offers an easy to use interface and gives the user a feel for what HARVEST has to offer.