Planning and Assessment of Alternative Forest Road and Skidding Networks

Road construction and harvesting operation have always been the two most expensive activities in forestry. The aim of this paper is to define a method to evaluate the forest road network variants. For this purpose,, the forest was sampled with the use of a systematic grid of 150 m by 200 m spacing by an inventory group. In each grid point the terrain conditions and stand data collected by the inventory group were analyzed using GIS. The forest was evaluated and maps of »Forest Potential for Road Construction« (FPRC) and »Forest Capacity for Harvesting« (FCH) were prepared, and then the first network was designed and costs were calculated. The skidding costs of each cross point were calculated for 3 types of extraction machines (two skidders and one farm tractor) and considering the results some better networks were designed. Finally a network was accepted in which not only the environmental impacts were decreased, but the costs of road network and skidding were minimized, so that the most suitable place for each skidder was determined and presented on a map using Linear Programming (LP).