Many real-world decision-making situations arise from agriculture and from forest management. Models and decision support systems to be used in agriculture or forestry are often presented at OR international conferences and workshops. Even though most presentations contain a section called “Validation” or “Discussion” those issues are often treated rather superficially. In other words, many presentations describe carefully what the program or model does, but they only briefly stress why and how it does it. The purpose of this volume is to focus on the methods in the context of the problems they are intended to solve. Read the rest of this entry »