9. Developing Silvicultural Expert Consulting Systems for Commercial Timber Plantations

Abstract

New software development tools are available which facilitate the production of expert consulting systems. Most noteworthy among these tools are declarative language compilers (e.g. PROLOG) and expert system shells with mathematical functions (e.g. EXSYS). Mobile expert consulting systems can help foresters to take good silvicultural decisions in the field. The size of a portable expert system is limited by memory and processor capacity. One of the aims in developing silvicultural consulting systems, therefore, is to use as few rules as possible. Rule parsimony may be achieved through the use of a few “key” quantitative relationships between variables. Attempts to establish such key quantitative relationships in pruning and thinning, with the aim of using these relationships in a silvicultural expert system, are described.