To contribute to the following vision:

1. UBC Faculty of Forestry is a global leader in researching, developing, and facilitating the application of educational, extension, decision support, and scenario analysis modelling tools for forestry. These tools make an important contribution to the solution of issues over the management of forests, and they help in the quest for sustainbility and stewardship of multiple values in our forests.
   

2. To develop and promote the use of multi-value, ecologically-based, stand and landscape level decision support tools for use in forest policy development and evaluation, forest management planning, forest certification, and forestry impacts monitoring systems.
   

3. To develop and promote the use of multi-value, stand and landscape level scenario analysis tools for use in education, extension, and public participation processes in forestry.

Mission of the Canadian Research Chair:

To develop ecologically based, forest ecosystem management simulation models based on the hybrid simulation modelling approach. These tools, which span from spatially-explicit, individual tree, ecosystem models, to landscape-level models at various spatial scales, are intended for a variety of uses, from scientific research, through professional decision support applications in forestry, agroforestry and land reclamation, to educational and extension tools. The latter will focus on scenario analysis of possible forest futures, linked to advanced visualization.

Strategy for the Chair:

Our modelling work of the past 25 years has produced two spin-off companies - Life Science Programming and FORRX - which are included in software development and software applications, respectively. The scientific foundations for the development of new and improved conceptual models are the focus of the Forest Ecosystem Management Simulation Group (FEMS), working out of the Ecosystem Management Systems (ECOMANS) laboratory in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC. The FEMS group consists of Research Associates, Post Doctoral Fellows and graduate students working with the the chair holder.