| Forest management assessment is a poorly understood concept and rarely implemented in practice. While stand responses to interventions are commonly monitored, forest responses to management interventions are not typically monitored and assessed in current practices; consequently, any sense of objective achievement is lacking. Assessment of forest response, however, is necessary to ensure that forest management efficiently and effectively moves a forest toward the desired objective, by detecting discrepancies to guide strategic corrective actions accordingly. Such an assessment would be ideal in adaptive management implementation. Feedback from the forest, as an essential part of adaptive management, will allow a true learning process to take place. As a consequence of poor assessment understanding and implementation, however, adaptive management has rarely been successfully implemented in the forest management decision making process.;This thesis proposes a framework and methodology of assessment to effectively implement adaptive forest management. Unlike current forest management practices that rely on a linear process, the proposed assessment framework and methodology incorporates a circular process. It identifies spatial forest structure, i.e. the array, amounts and geographical arrangement of forest conditions, as a basis for setting forest objectives, establishing spatial management strategies, and periodically measuring and assessing forest responses. The methodology embodies three main assessment components: (i) determining forest objectives in terms of performance indicators; (ii) measuring forest response, and (iii) evaluating forest response relative to forest objectives, and identifying causes of discrepancies to guide strategic corrective actions.;The proposed assessment framework and methodology was demonstrated in a case study with a portion of New Brunswick's forest as a study area. With timber and biodiversity assumed as the values desired from the study forest, forest objectives were hypothetically set using five performance indicators: age class distribution, patch size distribution, fractal dimension, shape index, and spatial auto-correlation. Satellite imagery of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) was examined for measuring forest responses. The examination revealed that forest responses, involving descriptive and locational attributes, can be classified and obtained from Landsat TM data. The forest classification accuracy achieved was 92%. Using the classified images, forest objectives relative to the actual forest condition were assessed and evaluated. Causes of discrepancies were traced by relating satellite data (landscape level), and historical data of GIS coverages (patch level). |
