POSSIBLE FOREST FUTURES is a game with which to explore what we mean by sustainability in forestry, and what we mean by good stewardship.  PFF is an ecologically-based vision of future forest conditions and values that could occur under alternative landscape management scenarios.  Different types of forest that exist because of different climates respond differently to natural disturbance and forest management.  They should be managed using different methods.  However, a lot of the issues in forestry apply to all forests.  The questions you will be faced with in PFF occur in almost all forests.  There are ecological differences between different types of forest, of course, and these will influence the way the simulated forest in PFF responds to the choices you make.

PFF is a user-friendly implementation of HORIZON. Because the setup of HORIZON is a time-consuming activity and requires a certain level of familiarity with preparing such models, PFF was developed to render the power of HORIZON available to the non-technical user. This is achieved by providing a small library of prepared setup files - a variety of histories of past disturbance and hence of starting ecosystem conditions. Also, there is a selection of different forest regions from within British Columbia, Canada to choose from. The user can then choose between a large number of alternative management strategies (scenarios) and watch the change in the maps of a variety of values, and graphs of these values. At the end of the run, the user can review any of these graphs for the whole watershed, or for each individual cutblock. Tabular analysis is also available for individual cutblocks.

Because a 120 year simulation can take 10-20 minutes, depending on computer speed, the user can choose to view a prepared set of movies in which previously prepared runs are replays in a couple of minutes. The user can also choose to make new movies and view them.