Decision making in forest road planning considering both skidding and road costs: a case study in the Hyrcanian Forest in Iran

doi:10.3832/ifor0640-006

Decision making in forest road planning considering both skidding and road costs: a case study in the Hyrcanian Forest in Iran

M Jourgholami⁽¹⁾ , E Abdi⁽¹⁾, W Chung⁽²⁾

iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 59-64 (2013)
doi: https://doi.org/10.3832/ifor0640-006
Published: Jan 21, 2013 - Copyright © 2013 SISEF

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Hyrcanian forest is the only forest designated for commercial timber production in Iran. Ground-based skidding is the most common extraction system used in the forest, though large parts of the forest are still inaccessible due to the low road density (1-2 m ha^-1). To facilitate timber harvesting in the forest, it has been proposed to increase the road density up to 20 m ha^-1. The aim of this study was to incorporate the estimated skidding costs through a time study into an existing transportation planning tool, NETWORK 2000, to help decision making on forest road building. We applied this method to the Gorazbon district in the Hyrcanian forest, where 244 links were built for the analysis. The best solution found by NETWORK 2000 indicates that all the proposed roads should be built to minimize the total skidding and road building costs.

Keywords

Forest Road Network, Optimization, NETWORK 2000, Fixed Cost, Variable Costs

Authors’ address

(1)

Department of Forestry and Forest Economics, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Karaj (Iran)

(2)

Department of Forest Management, College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana, Missoula (USA)

Corresponding author

M Jourgholami
mjgholami@ut.ac.ir

Citation

Jourgholami M, Abdi E, Chung W (2013). Decision making in forest road planning considering both skidding and road costs: a case study in the Hyrcanian Forest in Iran. iForest 6: 59-64. - doi: 10.3832/ifor0640-006

Academic Editor

Marco Borghetti

Paper history

Received: Aug 13, 2012
Accepted: Nov 06, 2012

First online: Jan 21, 2013
Publication Date: Apr 02, 2013
Publication Time: 2.53 months

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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