Spatial information for scheduling core area production in forest planning

Forest core area is the portion of the forested landscape that is free from edge effects from surrounding areas. Forest core area is important for specific plant communities and wildlife species. Identifying spatial interdependencies of site-specific management decisions is an important step for recognizing core area production in forest management scheduling models. A forest-wide map layer of influence zones can be used to identify the interdependencies. Each influence zone is a potential area for producing core area. Each is unique in terms of the specific combination of management units that interact to influence core area production. A raster-based approach is presented for identifying influence zones and estimating their area. Tests considered the need for precision in terms of the size of the raster cells for accurately identifying influence zones and estimating their size. Tests, using a 100 m buffer width for defining core area, show that scheduling results were relatively insensitive to gains in precision from using raster cell widths less than 30 m.