Impact assessments

An impact assessment or analysis is in many ways similar to strategic planning but has a different focus. While a strategic plan answers the question “How?” an impact assessment answers the question “What if?”. The line between these questions is not always obvious and while working with a strategic analysis the question “What if” often arise, and vice versa.

The interested party does not need be a forest owner but might just as well be a government agency or a research project. Impact assessments may be interesting to perform both at the stand level (for “type stands”) or for larger areas such as regions or the entire country.

One example of where TreeSys has performed an impact assessment is a computation for the Swedish Forest Agency report on turnaround times (Skogsstyrelsen 2015), which analyzed both stand and country levels to examine to what extent an amendment to the lowest permissible age for final felling can affect the long-term level of output. Another example of TreeSys participation is a research project at SLU analyzing why a mountainous area was deforested long ago. Heureka was used to simulate the development of birch forests assuming different levels of wood consumption for domestic use.