With respect to optimal forestry decisions under risk, one of the primary research focuses is the
optimum time for forest thinning and final-felling. Shi and Song (1999) studied the optimum harvest
time of timber stands under timber price risk. Xu and Song (2004) studied forest investment and optimum
time of final cutting with real option, and there was also other research on forest investment and
forest property evaluation with real option (Ge, 2004; Wei et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2006). Moreover, there
are many researchers who tried many different optimization methods to assist management decisionmaking
of forestry including: optimal control theory, dynamic programming, nonlinear programming,
stochastic dynamic programming, etc.