Behavioral Modelling in a Decision Support System

Considering the variety of attitudes, objectives and behaviors characterizing forest owners is crucial for accurately assessing the impact of policy and market drivers on forest resources. A serious shortcoming of existing pan-European Decision Support Systems (DSS) is that they do not account for such heterogeneity, consequently disregarding the effects that this might have on timber supply and forest development. Linking a behavioral harvesting decision model—Expected Value Asymmetries (EVA)—to a forest resource dynamics model—European Forestry Dynamics Model (EFDM)—we provide an example of how forest owner specific characterization can be integrated in a DSS. The simulation results indicate that the approach holds promise as regards accounting for forest owner behavior in simulations of forest resources development. Hence, forest owner heterogeneity makes the distribution of forest land on owner types non-trivial, as it affects harvesting intensity and, subsequently, inter-temporal forest development.

RINALDI Francesca;  JONSSON Klas Henrik Ragnar;  SALLNAES Petter;  TRUBINS Renats; 

2015-02-04

MDPI AG

JRC93773

1999-4907,   

www.mdpi.com/journal/forests,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC93773,   

10.3390/f6020311,