The Heureka system

StandWise is perhaps best described by the words Begin here! for those who want to learn more about Heureka. StandWise shows the development of individual stands given the different management choices made by the user.  

The program is interactive, which means that the user chooses what should happen and what should be analysed. The user steps forward or backward in time and tests different forest management measures to study the consequences. In addition to tables and diagrams, the analysis results can also be displayed in two- and three-dimensional visualisations of forest development over five-year periods. 
 

PlanWise is a powerful analysis and planning tool that has a wide range of uses both in terms of the size of the analysis area and the problems that can be addressed. 

PlanWise is a tool for analysing different management alternatives and for finding good solutions based on the users’ management objectives. It is designed for analysis and planning of medium and large forest holdings. For each forest stand, a number of possible treatment schedules are automatically generated. Each treatment schedule consists of forest management options and describes how they affect the development of the stand over time. It is, of course, also possible to generate treatment schedules without any management actions, where the forest is left unmanaged. Stands can easily be grouped based on, for example, a management target classification of the stands. For each group, the user sets the framework for the actions to be taken. PlanWise then produces a variety of treatment schedules that are within the user's framework. An optimization routine is then used to select the best treatment schedule for each stock. The latter step is done based on a goal formulation and possible constraints. Overall, PlanWise is thus clearly different from StandWise interactive analysis of one stand at a time and from the rule-driven approach found in RegWise. 

Long-term planning is usually done for a time horizon of 50 - 100 years, divided into five-year periods. In PlanWise, there is also a module for shorter-term, tactical planning, which is done on an annual basis and for 10-15 years. 

Forestry and its impacts can be analysed for forest landscapes of different sizes, such as large or small properties, catchment areas or municipalities' forest holdings. 

RegWise is used to study the impacts of different ways of using the forest at regional or national level. It has been developed for long-term analysis of large geographical areas. The analyses are often based on data from the Swedish National Forest Inventory, together with information from digital map data, remote sensing and combinations of these. 

Based on the conditions for forest management, the software provide a basis for evaluation and analyses on a variety of issues. While forest development is controlled interactively in StandWise and management actions are automatically generated and optimized in PlanVis, RegWise has a simulative approach where users control management for e.g. different forest types and landowners through a rule-based system. RegWise provides insights into questions such as: What if forest management takes one direction or another, across different regions or landowner categories? 

RegWise is primarily aimed at the Swedish Forest Agency, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, major forest companies and industry organizations. County administrative boards, municipalities, regional energy companies and non-governmental organizations can also benefit greatly from RegWise. 

PlanEval stands for Plan Evaluation and is designed to systematically rank and evaluate forest management scenarios generated with PlanWise or RegWise. 

PlanEval can be a support tool in situations where a forest owner or other decision-makers wish to rank different scenarios based on economic, ecological, and social values. This is done by generating a number of forest management scenarios using PlanWise or RegWise. In more complex decision-making situations, simply having more fact-based information—such as the number of available hectares suitable for a certain type of management—is rarely enough. The decision-maker must also reflect on their own values and weigh different aspects and sub-goals of the decision, such as bird habitats, recreational areas, and economic returns from timber. In order to make a decision, various preferences need to be considered and weighed together. This is where PlanEval becomes a valuable tool. 

Currently, PlanEval includes three different methods for weighing different objectives. The first is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP is one of the most established and well-documented methods within multi-criteria decision analysis. It is based on pairwise comparisons of sub-goals and alternatives. The method has been applied in many fields, including participatory forest planning for state or municipal land. The second method implemented in PlanEval is SMART. SMART is perceived by many as a simpler method and is based on each stakeholder assigning scores to different sub-goals and scenarios based on their importance. In addition, there are value functions that are can be used to evaluate how well the alternatives perform based on the goals.

Provided that forest management scenarios have been generated with PlanWise or RegWise, the work in PlanEval is carried out in four steps: 

• Defining the goals and sub-goals that the various forest management scenarios will be evaluated against.
• Assessing how important each goal and sub-goal is to the decision-maker.
• Evaluating the results for each individual sub-goal.
• Ranking the available forest management scenarios according to how well they match what the decision-maker considers important. 

When used correctly, PlanEval can support decision-making by explicitly considering multiple, potentially conflicting objectives, handling both qualitative and quantitative goals, structuring the problem, and providing a basis for discussion in participatory planning.