The California Conifer Timber Output Simulator
Authors of the CACTOS are
Greg S. Biging, P. J. Daugherty, Walter J. Meerschaert, Timothy A. Robards, Eric C. Turnblom, and Lee C. Wensel

The computer simulator CACTOS is designed for and by the timber industry of northern California with support from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) and the USDA Forest Service (USFS). The objective is to simulate the changes that take place in the forest stands of the mixed-conifer region of northern California. The changes simulated include the normal growth and mortality as well as the changes due to harvesting operations. The CACTOS System includes the basic "engine" of the system, CACTOS, as well as a series of utility programs to facilite the development of complete stand descriptions for CACTOS and the summary of the results.
The CACTOS System is being distributed by Lee C. Wensel

The programs are written in FORTRAN 77 and opperate in the DOS enviroment for IBM PC compatible computers. They are intended to be interactive, responding to two-letter commands from the keyboard. However, they can also be operated in "batch" mode.

CACTOS

The design of CACTOS is to read a stand description to perform basic growth, harvest and report functions as desired. The usual output of CACTOS consists of various report and yield files. It is also possible to create stand description files based upon the stand at any point in the simulation. A binary tree file can also be produced.