Brazil-DSS usage on short rotation eucalyptus pulp wood plantations

Case

Has flag	N/A
Has full name	DSS usage on short rotation eucalyptus pulp wood plantations in Brazil
Has country	Brazil
Has location
Has responsible organisation	Simosol
Has type of owner organization
Has related DSS
Has start date
Has end date
Has DSS development stage	use
Has decision stage
Has temporal scale	Long term (strategic), Medium term (tactical), Short term (operational)
Has spatial context	Non spatial
Has spatial scale	Forest level
Has decision making dimension	Single decision maker
Has objectives dimension	Single objective
Has goods and services dimension	Market wood products
Has working group theme
Has website
Has description	An in-depth interview of forest management planners of the use of DSS in their daily work; aspects of including which planning tasks they use DSS or not, and why. Focus on companies managing short rotation pulp wood plantations.
Has reference
Has wiki contact person	jussi.rasinmaki@simosol.fi
Has wiki contact e-mail	jussi.rasinmaki@simosol.fi
Has DSS development	Brazil: Short rotation eucalyptus pulp wood plantations.Description of DSS development
Has decision support techniques	Brazil: Short rotation eucalyptus pulp wood plantations.Decision support techniques
Has knowledge management processes	Brazil: Short rotation eucalyptus pulp wood plantations.Knowledge management process
Has support for social participation	Brazil: Short rotation eucalyptus pulp wood plantations.Social participation process

This case study was conducted in November 2013 as a FORSYS STSM. Interviews were done in 5 companies (3 belonging to this category) with the people responsible for forest management planning. The aim was to find out what the company does, how they do do it, do they use a DSS for it, why and why not?

The STSM was organised by Atrium Forest Consulting / Silvana Nobre. The background of the STSM researcher is forest management DSS development in Finland.

The management of the short rotation plantations for pulp wood production is characterised by relatively simple regime: establish stand, make sure it stays alive and grows well, do final harvest, i.e. no thinnings.

Special feature affecting the the planning for the plantations is that the growth characteristics of the stock will change with every new clone developed (MAI from 20 m³/ha per year in the 70s to 70 m³/ha, even 100 m³/ha per year now).

The planning is focused heavily on operational planning; to goal is to get a monthly schedule on what management actions to execute. This schedule is based strictly on the silvicultural regime defined for the plantation. However, as unexpected events do happen as well, the DSSs used for the operational planning have functionality to define rules what to do when things don't go according to plan. Hence you have the capability to adapt your month-to-month work schedules. A key feature is the ability to integrate this rescheduling to budgetting, and budget control. All the three companies working with short rotation plantations did this kind of operational planning with a DSS.

Strategic and tactical planning was of lesser importance to the companies, in that respect that only one out the three did use a specific DSS for this task. In that case it had a major guiding role, i.e. it would affect also the operational planning as far as the harvesting decision was concerned. In other companies long term view (meaning over one rotation) was taken at the investment decision phase, and the analysis was conducted with Excel.

In the case where the long term planning was used systematically on a yearly basis, besides the usual harvest scheduling problem, the strategic plan also included land use aspects, i.e. whether to use a piece of land for plantation, to sell it, or to use if for alternative land uses. Since the company in this case was an integrate having their own plantations and pulp&paper mills, the goal was to minimise the cost at the mill gate, and as a consequence where the timber is delivered was already part of the strategic problem.

The DSS used provided a very generic modelling platform for formulating the planning problem, so all the aspect mentioned above could be taken into account when solving the strategic problem. However, the solution was sought at the year level, which was a problem from the tactical planning point of view as the short rotation time (roughly 6 years) meant that tactical decisions need to be done at a monthly resolution. The experience was that it was too cumbersome to formulate the strategic plan in a way that it would serve also the within-year harvest scheduling. The solution for this was to do the assignment for the next couple of years manually with a solution based on Excel and the strategic plan solution stored in the stand registry database.

Observations:

• If your growth models change every 5 yrs.
  • Ether don't use growth models (intensive inventory)
  • Use growth models that are trivial to change
• Harvesting & timber sales mechanism increase the role of inventory, decrease the role of very accurate growth models; pre-harvest inventory determines the value (not 100% sure, check). Emphasis on inventory also in the DSS
• Major systems developed for this follow the same pattern; flexible master-detail database with the focus on describing the different aspects of operational information
• Long term planning outside Excel less of an issue: use generic solution not originally developed for "forestry as agriculture" => practical problems in matching the tool and the planning problem: months vs. years, data not needed for inventory, but for planning not recorded in inventories