Challenges in Patrolling to Maximize Pristine Forest Area (Position Paper)

Abstract:

Illegal extraction of forest resources is fought, in many developing countries, by patrols through the forest that seek to deter such activity by decreasing its profitability. With limited resources for performing such patrols, a patrol strategy will seek to distribute the patrols throughout the forest, in space and time, in order to minimize the resulting amount of extraction that occurs or maximize the degree of forest protection, according to one of several potential metrics. We pose this problem as a Stackelberg game. We adopt and extend the simple, geometrically elegant model of (Robinson 2010). First, we study optimal allocations of patrol density under generalizations of this model, relaxing several of its assumptions. Second, we pose the problem of generating actual schedules whose site visit frequencies are consistent with the analytically computed optimal patrol densities.