Artificial neural network modeling for reforestation design through the dominant trees bole-volume estimation

In the management of restoration reforestations or recreational reforestations of trees, the density of the planted trees and the site conditions can influence the growth and bole volume of the dominant tree. The ability to influence growth of these trees in a reforestation contributes greatly to the formation of large dimension trees and thereby to the production of commercially valuable wood. The potential of two artificial neural network (ANN) architectures in modeling the dominant Pinus brutia tree bole volume in reforestation configuration at 12 years of age was investigated: (1) the multilayer perceptron architecture using a back-propagation algorithm and (2) the cascade-correlation architecture, utilizing (a) either the nonlinear Kalman's filter theory or (b) the adaptive gradient descent learning rule. The incentive for developing bole-volume equations using ANN techniques was to demonstrate an alternative new methodology in the field of reforestation design, which would enable estimation and optimization of the bole volume of dominant trees in reforestations using easily measurable site and competition factors. The usage of the ANNs for the estimation of dominant tree bole volume through site and competition factors can be a very useful tool in forest management practice. ©2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc