Creating land allocation zones for forest management: a simulated annealing approach

This paper describes the Zone Allocation Model (ZAM) that uses the simulated annealing algorithm to create forest management zones. ZAM partitions the landscape into the Timber, Habitat, and Old Growth zones by allocating small land tiles into contiguous areas. The zone allocation process is guided by landscape-level targets and size and shape objectives. An ecological representation objective proportionally distributes all ecosystem types into each of the three zones. Priority objectives control allocation of identified lands that are targeted for specific zones. All objectives are combined within an objective function, with a penalty-weighting system specifying relative importance of each objective. The ZAM model found 1.7%–4.4% of theoretical optimum scores from small to large problems, respectively. A demonstration on a 1.2 × 10^6–ha landscape from coastal British Columbia illustrates the iterative exploration of compromises between objectives that leads to informed zone allocation decisions.