Economics and Management of Industrial Forest Plantations

This chapter deals with the basic principles underlying the optimum economic management of the industrial forest plantations. With this purpose the presentation will start with the introduction of basic concepts of the investment analysis, which will serve as a basis for explaining the tools most usually employed for analysing the profitability of this kind of investments. After this, the concept as well as the optimum economic determination of the forest rotation age will be analysed. Once the investment analysis and optimal forest rotation concepts have been reviewed, we focus in the basic aspects of forest valuation. Finally, an operations research technique used to optimize stand management planning decisions, as dynamic programming, will be shown.