Abordarea ierarhizata a deciziilor de grup

International audienceThe paper deals with a step-wise analytic hierarchy process (AHP) applied by a group of decision makers wherein nobody has a dominant position and it is unlikely to come to terms with respect to either the weights of different objectives or expected utilities of different alternatives. One of the AHP outcomes, that is the consistency index is computed for each decision maker, for all other decision makers but that one, and for the whole group. Doing so, the group is able to assess to which extent each decision maker alters the group consistency index and a better consistency index could be achieved if the assessment procedure is being resumed by the most influential decision maker in terms of consistency. The main contribution of the new approach is the algorithm presented in as a flow chart where the condition to stop the process might be either a threshold value for the consistency index, or a given number of iterations for the group or decision maker, depending on the degree to which the targeted goal has been decomposed into conflictual objectives

EFO-LCI: A New Life Cycle Inventory Database of Forestry Operations in Europe

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a common methodology to analyze environmental impacts of forestry systems. Although LCA has been widely applied to forestry since the 90s, the LCAs are still often based on generic Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). With the purpose of improving LCA practices in the forestry sector, we developed a European Life Cycle Inventory of Forestry Operations (EFO-LCI) and analyzed the available information to check if within the European forestry sector national differences really exist. We classified the European forests on the basis of "Forest Units" (combinations of tree species and silvicultural practices). For each Forest Unit, we constructed the LCI of their forest management practices on the basis of a questionnaire filled out by national silvicultural experts. We analyzed the data reported to evaluate how they vary over Europe and how they affect LCA results and made freely available the inventory data collected for future use. The study shows important variability in rotation length, type of regeneration, amount and assortments of wood products harvested, and machinery used due to the differences in management practices. The existing variability on these activities sensibly affect LCA results of forestry practices and raw wood production. Although it is practically unfeasible to collect site-specific data for all the LCAs involving forest-based products, the use of less generic LCI data of forestry practice is desirable to improve the reliability of the studies. With the release of EFO-LCI we made a step toward the construction of regionalized LCI for the European forestry sector

26th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*2017): Part 3 - Meeting Abstracts - Antwerp, Belgium. 15–20 July 2017

This work was produced as part of the activities of FAPESP Research,\ud Disseminations and Innovation Center for Neuromathematics (grant\ud 2013/07699-0, S. Paulo Research Foundation). NLK is supported by a\ud FAPESP postdoctoral fellowship (grant 2016/03855-5). ACR is partially\ud supported by a CNPq fellowship (grant 306251/2014-0)

Accounting for windthrow risk in forest management planning: a Romanian tailor-made solution

Aim of study: To better estimate the annual allowable cut reserve (AACR), taking into consideration the endemic windthrows (EW), we combined a series of existing algorithms into a coherent methodology to use the data available at district level, without any additional fieldworks.Area of study: The algorithm was tested on the EW occurred in the last 20 years in Brosteni FD (Eastern Carpathians, Romania) that covers 21,013 ha and we found that every year from an AAC of 37,000 m3 no more than 2,700 m3 shall be spared for EW that might occur next year.Material and methods: We considered three EW enabling factors (stand slenderness, location on pits and mounds, and the vicinity of canopy gap) and three contingency tables of the EW produced between 1999 and 2008, one for each 40-year age group. Then we calculated a Bayesian model for all six permutations of enabling factors, each of them being tested on the data referring to 2008-2017 periodResults: Plugging the posterior EW likelihoods into a Markov chains (MC) model, we produced a formula that enables a better estimation of the optimal AACR that could be replaced with salvage cuttings every next year. Other options of using the EW likelihoods are also presented at length, such as the type of age-class structure that requires no AACR, that is a “U” shape age structure, as well as a rough assessment of the additional demand for seedlings needed to re-plant the stands affected by EW. The relatively short period of time the input data refer to, which is ten years, equals the time window of the forest planning and this parity allows a ten-year forecast period, enough for modeling the stationary age-structure of even-aged forests.Research highlights: A new model for optimizing the annual allowable cut (AAC) in even-age forests in the context of endemic windthrows (EW) scenario has been developed and evaluated.Keywords: Bayes’ rule, forest management planning, endemic windthrows

Accounting for windthrow risk in forest management planning: a Romanian tailor-made solution

Aim of study: To better estimate the annual allowable cut reserve (AACR), taking into consideration the endemic windthrows (EW), we combined a series of existing algorithms into a coherent methodology to use the data available at district level, without any additional fieldworks. Area of study: The algorithm was tested on the EW occurred in the last 20 years in Brosteni FD (Eastern Carpathians, Romania) that covers 21,013 ha and we found that every year from an AAC of 37,000 m3 no more than 2,700 m3 shall be spared for EW that might occur next year. Material and methods: We considered three EW enabling factors (stand slenderness, location on pits and mounds, and the vicinity of canopy gap) and three contingency tables of the EW produced between 1999 and 2008, one for each 40-year age group. Then we calculated a Bayesian model for all six permutations of enabling factors, each of them being tested on the data referring to 2008-2017 period Results: Plugging the posterior EW likelihoods into a Markov chains (MC) model, we produced a formula that enables a better estimation of the optimal AACR that could be replaced with salvage cuttings every next year. Other options of using the EW likelihoods are also presented at length, such as the type of age-class structure that requires no AACR, that is a “U” shape age structure, as well as a rough assessment of the additional demand for seedlings needed to re-plant the stands affected by EW. The relatively short period of time the input data refer to, which is ten years, equals the time window of the forest planning and this parity allows a ten-year forecast period, enough for modeling the stationary age-structure of even-aged forests. Research highlights: A new model for optimizing the annual allowable cut (AAC) in even-age forests in the context of endemic windthrows (EW) scenario has been developed and evaluated. Keywords: Bayes’ rule, forest management planning, endemic windthrows

Impact of the Main Currencies Exchange Rates on the Romanian Economic Policy Transformation

Evolutions of the exchange rates in a contemporary competitive economy represent an influential marker in evaluating the effects of the governmental policies in field of monetary policy and marks future directions in developing the specific policies in the field. This study investigates how the exchange rates of EUR, USD, GBP and CHF were influenced by disturbing factors and the existence of potential quantitative correlations and dependencies among the four exchange rates in terms of uncertainty

Improving communication among stakeholders through ex-post transactional analysis -- case study on Romanian forestry

One of the most visible components of the Forestry Development Project, carried out between 2003 and 2009 by the World Bank and Romanian Government was "PR support, Awareness Campaign and Development of PR products", meant to improve the communication between all stakeholders involved in sustainable forest management. The awareness campaign mainly consisted of nine meetings with the forest owners and nine workshops with all stakeholders, i.e. representatives of the forest inspectorates, county headquarters of the national forest administration, mass media, forest landowners, forest managers, logging companies and local authorities, including police and gendarmerie. The discussions, facilitated in each meeting by the three authors, were recorded and the minutes produced there have been further used for diagnosing the main interaction bottlenecks occurred between stakeholders. These discussions have been examined through the transactional analysis method in order to find out the main communication problems needed to addresses at national, regional and local level by the representatives of the public authorities in charge with implementing and supervising the forest policy. The main results of this analysis consist of a list of problems supposed to generate conflicts of various kinds (legal, technical, managerial and communicational) in Romanian forestry. The study has also revealed some important and frequent pitfalls that jeopardize the communication between prevailing stakeholders. Explaining them and their root causes could be a very useful input for further PR training programs and for the academic curricula.Policy implementation Discourse Consultation Conflict management Forest management

Variabilitatea dimensională a arborilor şi diversitatea florei vasculare în amestecuri de răşinoase cu fag din rezervaţia Codrul secular Slătioara [Tree size variability and plant diversity in mixed coniferous-beech forests in Slătioara Forest Reserve]

The paper analyses, from structural and compositional aspects, the diversity of vascular flora from natural mixed forests with coniferous and beech. Six experimental plots were installed in mixed forest stands with coniferous and beech from Slătioara natural reserve, and the vascular flora was studied on three different layers: trees, seedlings and herbaceous layer. For each layer the species diversity was assessed through Shannon index, and additionally, for trees’ layer, the structural diversity was quantified with respect to the basal area, using the Gini index. It was observed that among the experimental plots, the Gini index ranges between 0.65 and 0.83, corresponding to the uneven-sized balanced structures, and Shannon index computed for species diversity ranges between 0.66 and 1.22 for trees layer, between 0.71 and 1.38 for seedling and between 1.12 and 2.38 for herbaceous layer. The structural diversity of trees layer assessed through the Gini index do not influences directly the species diversity of seedling and herbaceous layers. Nevertheless, when Gini index is higher than 0.48, only shadow tolerant species (ex. Silver fir) might form pure seedling patches. Additionally, regarding the trees layer, pure patches are formed only by beech (92%) or silver fir (8%), and the pure silver fir patches are characterized by low structural diversity (Gini index ranges between 0.27 and 0.32). Also, it was found that beyond certain thresholds of Gini index, the increase of structural diversity is associated with a decrease in the spread of variation of species diversity for all the analyzed layers, and the identified thresholds of Gini index are: 0.6 for trees layer, respectively 0.7 for seedling and herbaceous layer