National Forest Planning is Promoting US Forest Service Acceptance of Operations Research

To comply with the National Forest Management Act of 1976, operations research analysts were placed in nearly all of the 121 national forest headquarters to perform forest-level planning using large and complex linear programming models. In spite of early criticism, the models and the analysts are now being accepted by middle managers as valuable aids to modern forest management. As more advanced technology reaches the Forest Service through—among other things—a newly purchased distributed computer system, these gains in operations research will be the groundwork for extensive future applications.