The development of SIMFOR began in 1991 at the Centre for Applied Conservation Biology, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia. SIMFOR was originally developed by Fred Bunnell, Dave Daust and Rob McCann as a research tool to address the questions that arose from the provincial government's Old Growth Strategy regarding amounts and distributions of old-growth habitat. Approaches to answering these questions were encouraged by Bill Bourgeois. The original version was coded in Pascal for a DOS platform. While SIMFOR initially incorporated its own harvest scheduler, this was recognized as a duplication of John Nelson's ATLAS harvest scheduler. Subsequent development allowed SIMFOR to link with any spatially explicit harvest-scheduler, though it is most often used in conjunction with ATLAS.

Over the next 4 years (1991-1994), Dave Daust redeveloped SIMFOR in QuickBasic, still utilizing a DOS platform. The original focus of the tool to help design spatially-explicit research was never wholly attained. However, SIMFOR was quickly able to expose unforeseen consequences of rule-based approaches to sustaining habitat. In response to requests from government agencies and industry, SIMFOR became increasingly used as a planning tool.

The arrival of the Forest Practices Code in British Columbia (1995) necessitated the use of spatially-explicit planning tools to allow the impacts of forest policy and practices to be projected. In response, the redevelopment of SIMFOR in a Windows environment was initiated and included a more formal linkage with the ATLAS harvest scheduler. The software was linked to a Microsoft Access database and core algorithms were divided into 2 modules - Habitat and Landscape. Mark Hafer coded modules in C++. Glenn Sutherland, Dave Gizowski and Ralph Wells developed and coded the linkage with Access and a Windows interface for SIMFOR in VisualBasic. In 1998-1999, Ralph Wells worked with programmer Dave Cowperthwaite to develop a new viewer and interface, allowing the output of ASCII files from Access for use in SIMFOR modules. In 2000-2001, Ralph and programmer Arnold Moy designed SIMFOR Version 3, linking SIMFOR to the ESRI Arcview 3 viewer and binary grid data format. A new interface linked to a re-designed Access database was coded in Visual Basic and core algorithms were coded in C.

Acknowledgments

SIMFOR has been developed under the direction of Fred Bunnell of the Centre for Applied Conservation Research (formerly the Centre for Applied Conservation Biology), University of British Columbia. The initial design was developed by Fred Bunnell, Dave Daust and Rob McCann. The software was designed and programmed through a number of versions by Dave Cowperthwaite, Dave Daust, Mark Hafer, Dave Gizowski,, Arnold Moy, Glenn Sutherland and Ralph Wells. The development has been helped considerably by the feedback and comments of many, including Mark Boyland, Dave Byng, Reg Davis, Devon Haag, Stephanie Melles, Susan Paczek and Eric Valdal (thank you, SIMFOR "beta testers").

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Canadian Forest Service, Canadian Wildlife Service, Lignum, MacMillan Bloedel and Western Forest Products. Development of Version 3 was supported by Forest Renewal B.C. funding provided by the Arrow Innovative Forest Practice Agreement and Invermere Enhanced Forest Management Pilot Project. We thank Greg Anderson, John Barker, Bill Bourgeois, Bill Dumont, Michael Dunn, Glen Dunsworth, Paul Jeakins and Ian Thompson for their support of SIMFOR development.

This site was developed by Devon Haag and Dermot Glennon. Devon Haag, Ralph Wells and Mark Boyland were responsible for content development. We acknowledge Fred Bunnell, Isabelle Houde and Dan Sudia for the use of their photographs.