Risk preferences and optimal management of uneven-aged forests in the presence of climate change: a Markov decision process approach

This study analyzes optimal harvesting of uneven-aged stands by applying a Markov Decision Processes (MDP) framework and an economic description of uneven-aged forestry. Two management types are considered: the exact uneven-aged forest management model in which the forest owner jointly manages all the different stand plots, and the independent uneven-aged forest management model that assumes that the forest owner separately and independently manages each plot of the forest. The MDP framework is applied to a non-industrial private forest owner located in North-East of France. The zip file contains Matlab code(files RUN.m and run_all_cases.m), results (directories RESULT_n5 and RESULT_n10) and howto information (file README) to reproduce experiments.