Watershed Management on Range and Forest Lands Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop of the United States/Australia Rangelands Panel

Preface: The U.S.-Australia Cooperative Rangeland Science Program In October 1968 the governments of the United States and Australia entered into an agreement for the purpose of facilitating close cooperative activities between the scientific communities of the two countries. The joint communique issued at that time designated the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education and Science as the coordinating agencies. Both countries were to encourage binational teamwork in research, interchanges of scientists, joint seminars, and exchanges of information. A United States-Australia Rangeland Panel was established in December 1969 to further cooperation between the two countries in the rangeland sciences. The present panel includes the following

Some Operations Research Applications in the Conservation of Wildland Resources

This paper was written to indicate some of the limited O.R. work done on wildland problems and to call attention to the ever-increasing opportunity for more effort. The first example presents a beginning approach to the problem of minimizing wildland fire costs--one which shows that a sizable increase in prevention and presuppression activities can lead to considerable savings if total costs include fire losses. The second example challenges the commonly used strategy of insect pest control--in large part because of the non-Markovian nature of the problem. The third example deals with the application of linear programming to the problem of managing a wildland area as a continuing source of one or more products or services. Finally, two examples of simulation techniques--applied to forest management and forest sampling--are described briefly.