Modelling Self-Organization Processes in Socio- Economic and Ecological Systems for Supporting the Adaptive Management of Forests

Managing the numerous and interrelated processes between man and nature in order to use renewable resources in a sustainable way is confronted with conflicting objectives, external effects, complex interdependencies, uncertainty and other features that make it nearly impossible to come to unambiguous optimal decisions. Self-organization in socio-economic and ecological systems the process of structuring a system by the elements of the system themselves without hierarchical or external control is often the reason for ambiguity and uncertainty. Adaptive management is an approach to deal with these challenges. This natural resource management method is permanently monitoring both socio-economic and ecological systems in order to be able to react rapidly on any development pushing the systems into an undesired direction. Understanding and simulating the underlying self-organization processes helps to make the adaptive management of renewable resources both more effective and more efficient. In this paper we present a simple conceptual model of self-organization in socio-economic and ecological systems to understand better their effects on the interrelations between them, applied to the special case of forestry.