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3. FORESTRY

3.1. INTRODUCTION

Brack (Brack 91) put expert system use in forestry and forest planning on the agenda in his degree work. Though few systems were started during the first half of the 1980s a number of systems have been subjected to both testing and use at the end of the decade. Those and their successors have addressed several aspects of the management issue.

Forests are managed for multiple purposes; timber production, recreation, fish and wildlife, hydrology, and grazing are a few to mention. Forests are also a kind of resource in constant demand. Pulp, building materials, and firewood are all appreciated. However, over the years, people have learned that forests play an important regulating role both locally and globally; they influence climate, binds the soil, and give rise to nitrogen recirculation. The management of forests includes cultivation, protection, and careful harvesting. Forestry shares important issues with crop management for large farmlands. Agroforestry is a term that addresses both the farming aspect as well as forestry.


TABLE 2
Forestry Systems
 
Year
reported
Name of system Domain knowledge Technology applied Reference
 
1989 PHOENIX Management of forest fires Real-time planning, intelligent agents (Cohen 89)
1989 GYPSEX Aerial application of pesticides against gypsy moth Frames and objects, C (Foster 89)
1990 ISPBEX Pest management Hybrid system, production rules (Flamm 91)
1993 SEIDAM Data management in forestry Machine-learning, planning, co-operative expert systems, hybrid units, agents (Matwin 95; Bhogal 96)
1994 Kendon et al. Agroforestry in developing countries Task language, decision support, small systems (Kendon 95)
1995 Alwast and Miliszewska Integration of management facilities Hybrid system, intelligent cooperative agents, decision support (Alwast 95)
1995 UNU-AES Land-use, fuel wood supplies Production rules, expert system shell, objects (Warkentin 96)
1996 University of Georgia Forest inventory Production rules, expert system shell (EXSYS 96)

A forest may represent tremendous commercial value. Threats, such as fire and pests must be dealt with in a systematic manner. Fighting pests will often involve harmful secondary effects on people and the environment if not carried out in a careful manner. Pest fighting is a field of expertise that has evolved rapidly over the last decade; many aspects are still qualitative and include a good deal of heuristics. The field lends itself to expert system building and early systems like GYPSEX (Foster 89) demonstrate both purpose and benefit. Firefighting is an obvious expertise area where expert system development may produce significant rewards.

Another aspect of the management task is to determine where to harvest and how to do it. This requires a good overview of the various resources. The use of remote sensing has become popular in order to provide a foundation for decision-making pertinent to large areas. A large amount of data, difficult processing, and the need for in-depth knowledge in several related domains make the management job on this scale a very challenging job. In the 1990s, sophisticated knowledge-based paradigms have made the problem mature for expert system modeling. Several attempts have also been tried to get on top of it. Sophisticated data fusion, scheduling, and planning of forest operations are typical for these initiatives.

Other applications have been created that border on the agriculture domain; tree planting is one of them. This deals with applying woods for shelter and regulating devices to avoid erosion and improper taxation of the land. Again, the field is expertise demanding. However, the problem is often treated as a diagnostic one, lending itself to standard rule-based treatment. In Table 2, a list of forestry systems are compiled; it covers a broad field of application and spans several years. Next to mineral exploration and analysis, forestry seems to be the most active area in terms of expert system development.


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