17. Modeling the Future Evolution of Chilean Forests to Guide Current Practices. Native Forest and Industrial Timber Plantations in Southern Chile

Scientific research builds projects and seeks to achieve specific goals that refer to the principles of scientific inference: deduction, induction and abduction. These inferences correspond to the time path of the prediction—which belongs to the world of rationality and accuracy—and scenarios—which transcribe the uncertain nature of the studied process and can describe, in some cases, a probable future, desirable or not. Because the conclusion of deductive inference stems from premises, predictive simulation must be the result of past observations. Optimization of these results requires a rigorous calibration of the model, in order to reproduce a known situation (past or present). Scenarios are not predictions. For exploratory scenarios (forecasting), plausible hypotheses are built from observed processes and can only be verified a posteriori. The scenario begins with a given situation in the present and moves forward into the future, responding to the question “What may happen if …?” The normative scenario (inductive inference) describes a probable or desirable (or undesirable) future and then moves backwards to the present, i.e. retrospectively. The attitude is proactive towards the future and responds to the question “How can a specific target be reached?”. These inferences give rise to specific approaches in terms of modeling and simulation. By focusing on forest dynamics in the south of Chile, this paper presents an expert approach (multi-criteria evaluation with Markovian chains) to map predictive and exploratory scenarios. The results open up various interesting lines of discussion in terms of resource management and clearly show the importance of model calibration (choice of data and configuration) upstream of the simulation process.