Objective  In order to ensure ecological security at a national scale and improve forest quality, the former National Forestry Administration issued the “Guidelines for the Preparation of County-Level Forest Management Planning” in 2018. All the counties and cities across the country were first time required to complete a county-level forest management planning and to consider the plans as a guideline document for county-level forest management in the next thirty years. Since conducting the county-level forest management planning needs high-level specializations with great amount of work, computer programs are practically significant for effectively completing high-quality plans.

  Method  Based on the MATLAB 2014a platform and the “Guidelines for the Preparation of County-Level Forest Management Planning”, a computer program package was developed using MATLAB language to assist in preparing the county-level forest management planning.

  Result  The computer program package consists of more than six modules used for data preprocessing, working group of silviculture organization, silvicultural system design, forest management district classification, investment estimation, export of forest management database, etc. The programs were applied to prepare forest management planning of Fengkai County, Haifeng County, Gaozhou City, Huazhou City, Xinyi City, and Shunde District of Foshan, Guangdong Province of southern China. The results show that the computer programs work well in accomplishment of the forest management relevant tasks.

  Conclusion  The computer programs have friendly user interfaces and are easy to learn and use with characteristics of reliability and stability and ability of extension. The programs can be utilized to greatly improve the quality and efficiency of conducting forest management planning and also to assist in other relevant forestry survey planning and design.