Economic and biological compatibility of timber and wildlife production: an illustrative use of production possibilities frontier

Considering multiple objectives is an important aspect of modern forestry, but quantifying the trade-offs among commodity and noncommodity resources r emains an obstacle to efficient forest planning. We illustrate how producti on possibilities frontier (PPF) methodology can be used for multiple-object ive analysis, focusing on trade-offs between timber production and several noncommodity resources as functions of timber harvest strategy. To do this, we modeled forest structure as a consequence of 6 silvicultural strategies that differed in harvest intensity and we used existing resource models to project responses of selected wildlife habitat attributes, resistance of f orest stands to insects and fire, and longterm financial returns. Graphing resource outputs against one another illustrates the nature and extent of t he trade-offs among our silvicultural alternatives. To illustrate the utili ty of PPF methodology, we assumed a priori that all of our noncommodity res ources would exhibit incompatible relationships with timber harvesting. How ever, incompatible relationships were rare. Instead, competitive and comple mentary relationships were common in our long-term projections. Competitive and complementary relationships are defined by continuous trade-off functi ons that can lead to "optimum" management solutions with multiple outputs. Knowing the PPF relationship helps quantify biological and economic trade-o ffs from silvicultural designed modifications to stands. Our results demons trate that management costs exert a substantial influence on the feasibilit y of any strategy regardless of its biological merit and that optimizing be tween limber and noncommodity resources would require explicit knowledge of their relative values.