Functional forest road network planning by consideration of environmental impact assessment for wood harvesting

Abstract

Forest management today has to meet a number of objectives. Planning of multi-functional forest road networks is one essential for meeting the aims of the sustainable forest concept. Road construction damages the natural environment unless it is carefully thought out. As forest engineers we have to consider the protection of nature when designing forest roads. With this aim in mind, a new network planning approach was developed for wood-harvesting. A geographical information system (GIS) was used to evaluate the data and planning process. The new forest road network plan for Catak Forest District constituted the addition of a new 16-road segment, total length 59.067 km, to the existing road network plan, for the purpose of wood-harvesting operations. Forest road density value was determined as 22.8 m/ha: the opening-up rate of the area was increased to 77.8% and the opening-up rate of the existing stand value was increased to 94.3% after close examination. 90.2% of roads were planned for the forest areas where there is likely to be minimal negative environmental impact.

Incorporating spatio-temporal knowledge in an Intelligent Agent Model for natural resource management

“…If a particular solution provides a higher profit than what the agent thinks it can achieve, those areas that constitute that solution will receive an increase in their Quality -a value that signals how beneficial the area is for achieving the agent's objective. This is similar to existing forest harvesting models that evaluate harvesting within conservation constraints (Csuti et al, 1997;Marinov et al, 2004) and the need to construct roads (Gumus et al, 2008;Spring et al, 2008;Hruza, 2003;ReVelle and Snyder, 1996). However, the novelty of the Intelligent Agent Model is in the temporal weighting of actions that facilitate knowing when specific actions should be taken in order to achieve an objective under spatial constraints.…”

A Decision Support System Web—Application for the Management of Forest Road Network

“…to provide efficient planning for improving the forest road network to ensure a smooth supply of forest products to the corresponding forest industries [16]. Gumus, S., et al [17] use GIS to assess the forest road network environmentally by looking at figures from various environmental indicators.…”

A systematic review of indicators to assess the sustainability of road infrastructure projects

“…The criterion livelihood security and opportunity is adopted to construct indicators related to the socioeconomic effects of projects. These indicators can be grouped into mobility and accessibility improvement, community livability [9,16,24,45,48,55,57,84], and societal wellbeing and equity [10,21,36,42,71]. Several indicators concern intergenerational equity (e.g., direct and indirect effects on employment), and transportation costs are also derived from the criterion [42,71].…”