Tree and stand conditions change over time as trees grow in size and as they interact with other plants, animals, and ecological processes. Trees and stands are treated with silvicultural practices to change, accelerate change, or maintain their condition. Selective herbicides can be applied after planting to give a desired tree species a head start in growth that will allow it to outcompete other types of vegetation. The trees left behind in a thinned stand develop larger stems at a faster rate than they would if not thinned.

VirtSilv is providing important data for decision makers.

Based on scanned data the terrain data can be used as a cost raster that indicate the cost of building a forest road on a given pixel; polygons that represent harvested areas; lines that represent the main road network to which the forest road network must ultimately connect to; and a heuristic that determine in which order the roads are created by the algorithm.