ATLAS was developed at the University of British Columbia by a team headed by Dr. John Nelson. The design team included Tim Shannon, Ralph Wells, Mark Hafer, and Dr. Glenn Sutherland, with programming by David Gizowski. In it's most recent release, ATLAS is has been renamed FPS -- Forest Planning Studio.

Funding for this model and related research has been provided by Forest Renewal BC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), National Centres of Excellence - Sustainable Forest Network, BC Ministry of Forests, Western Forest Products Ltd., Canadian Forest Products Ltd. and West Fraser Mills Ltd.

Model Overview

ATLAS is a spatially explicit harvest simulation model. ATLAS is designed to schedule timber harvests according to spatial and temporal objectives that simulate a range of present and experimental management regimes. These include policies related to harvest flows, opening size, riparian buffers, seral stage distributions and patch size distributions.

The basic data inputs are a GIS map (including polygons with stand characteristics) and growth and yield curves (describing how the merchantable volume in each stand will change over time). The modeler applies silviculture systems, and minimum rotation ages to each polygon, and seral stage objectives and harvest objectives to the forest. Runs are done with variable time step intervals; at each time step, polygons are first ranked according to a cutting priority (e.g. oldest first). Polygons are then harvested from this queue subject to constraints designed to meet forest level objectives (e.g. opening size and seral stage targets). Polygons are harvested until either the queue is exhausted or the periodic harvest target is met. At this stage the forest is aged to the next time period, and the process is repeated. At each time period, the model reports the status of every polygon in the forest estate. These periodic inventories can be quickly displayed with a map viewer to assess harvest patterns and/or exported to other landscape models for further analysis (such as SIMFOR). Road construction, length of active road, and other indicators of road network activity related to the harvest schedule are also reported.

Forest regulations in British Columbia have undergone a rapid evolution in the last 20 years. The public has shown a much stronger interest in the way our forests are managed, and have insisted that resource objectives aside from the classics of timber, water, and game be given importance. Accordingly, forest regulations have become very complex.

Regulation has created new requirements in forest resource management: plans must be done spatially through longer time periods, accompanied by explanations on how each resource objective will be met in the future. The added complexity has presented difficulties: sometimes simple policy changes have unintended effects on the landscape. Policies can interact with each other to produce unexpected results.

ATLAS and SIMFOR were created to help forest managers with the new challenges of planning intensity and complexity. ATLAS can simulate how different policies will effect harvesting and retention levels across the landscape, and SIMFOR simulates the effects these resultant landscapes on vertebrate species, as well as calculating spatial indices, such as seral patch distributions. They are designed to work together to provide forest resource managers with a practical, spatially explicit, simulation tool that links the long-term strategic-level with the shorter-tem tactical-level planning arenas.