A LANDIS-II extension for simulating forest road networks
Abstract
Forest roads are an important part of forest management, both in terms of cost and impact on surrounding ecosystems. Existing tools to simulate the construction of forest roads have been designed for tactical or operational planning purposes, for relatively small areas (<10 000 ha) and small-scale topographic information. Hence, no forest road simulation tool properly exists to assist forest landscape ecology and management research. Here, we present the Forest Roads Simulation (FRS) extension for the LANDIS-II model—a spatially explicit landscape simulation model of forest succession and disturbances. The FRS extension simulates forest road networks via a least-cost path algorithm accounting for landscape structure, decision inputs, and forest road types. We demonstrate the accuracy with which the FRS extension reproduces several key characteristics of existing road networks in two managed regions in Quebec, Canada: road density, road position, and fragmentation of the landscape. The FRS extension is easy to parameterize, proposing many options for researchers to simulate forest road networks at a strategic level in managed landscapes. It can tackle new research questions investigating the effects of forest roads within management strategies, such as the cost of road construction and habitat fragmentation, across large management units and long planning horizons.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Canadian Journal of Forest Research
Volume 53 • Number 7 • July 2023
Pages: 503 - 518
History
Received: 2 December 2022
Accepted: 16 February 2023
Version of record online: 28 March 2023
Copyright
© 2023 The Author(s). Permission for reuse (free in most cases) can be obtained from copyright.com.
Data Availability Statement
The source code, binaries and user guide of the FRS extension are all available at https://github.com/Klemet/LANDIS-II-Forest-Roads-Simulation-extension.
Key Words
Authors
Author Contributions
Conceptualization: CH, CM, OV, EF
Data curation: CH
Formal analysis: CH
Funding acquisition: CM, EF
Investigation: CH, EF
Methodology: CH, EF
Resources: EF
Software: CH, OV
Supervision: CM, EF
Visualization: CH
Writing – original draft: CH
Writing – review & editing: CM, OV, EF
Competing Interests
The authors declare there are no competing interests.
Funding Information
Funding was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through a Collaborative Research and Development grant awarded to CM (RDCPJ: 498998-16) with the joint support of Resolute Forest Products, and a Discovery grant awarded to EF (RGPIN: 2018-06156).
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Clément Hardy, Christian Messier, Osvaldo Valeria, and Elise Filotas. 2023. A LANDIS-II extension for simulating forest road networks. Canadian Journal of Forest Research.
53(7): 503-518. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfr-2022-0306
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