Forest road network

A requirement for efficient forest management is good planning of measures in advance as well as a good forest road network that allows access to the forest. Both are important criteria, because the financial effort for forest management, timber harvesting and forest road access is substantial: According to the Forestry Test Operation Network (TBN) 72 % of the costs of Swiss forest enterprises can be allocated to timber harvesting and forest road maintenance.

We develop the method set 'overall concepts for access' to advise cantons, forest districts or large forest enterprises in the strategic planning around the further development of accesses and to provide a basis for planning in this respect. It consists of 3 steps:

• Evaluation of the quality of the forest access, which indicates for each forest parcel whether the use of a state of the art timber harvesting method is possible (depending on the terrain properties).
• Evaluation of the economic efficiency of the forest road network on the basis of various indicators.
• Mathematical optimization methods for the design or reengineering of forest road networks.