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Abstract: Forest road network planning plays a crucial role in sustainable forest management. The goal of this paper is to develop a road network in a 400 ha forest from Lower Austria, in order to solve the problem of accessibility and to reduce the harvesting costs. State of the art tools RoadEng®, ESRI® Arc GIS and MS Office Excel® have been used. The designed forest road network consists of slope roads with total length of 17.11 km. The resulted road density in the project area is 42.77 m/ha and the road distance is 234 m. The construction costs are estimated to 36.80 euro/m, and the harvesting costs have decreased from an average of 27.90 euro/m3 before the road network was planned to an average of 22.60 euro/m3 after planning the road network.
Key words: forest road network, road designing, forest engineering.
1. Introduction
The need for a sound and sustainable use of forests in mountainous regions requires a better access to forest stands through a properly developed forest infrastructure. Strategic decisions in timber harvesting have long term consequences on the further development of forests [7] and efficient harvesting systems are based on well established forest road networks [8]. Under these circumstances, forest road network planning plays a crucial role in fulfilling the goals of sustainable forest management and both in valuing the multiple uses of forests and in finding the pragmatic solutions which are best adapted to the local socioeconomic and environmental conditions [3]. Therefore it is of critical importance that all phases in the designing and construction of forest road networks are carried out in a manner that is compatible with environmental values and sustainable forest management, taking also into account the important multipurpose benefits of forest road networks [2]. Therefore, a functional approach is needed in forest road planning [5] and this problem must be regarded in the context of multi-purpose management and by making use of state of the art tools and techniques.
The aim of this paper is to develop a forest road network in a project area of 400 ha from Trauch Forest District, Lower Austria which has restricted access to the forest stands. These stands can be reached only through old valley roads which are exposed to the...