HeProMo: A decision support tool to estimate wood harvesting productivities

In the field of forestry, one of the most economically important ecosystem service is the provision of timber. The need to calculate the economic effects of forest management in the short, medium, and long term is increasing. Forest operations or timber harvesting, which comprises felling, processing, and transport of trees or timber, are responsible for a large part of the costs and environmental impacts associated to forest management or enterprises. From a decision maker’s perspective, it is essential to estimate working productivity and production costs under given operating conditions before any operation is conducted. This work addresses the lack of a valid collection of models that allows estimating time, productivities, and costs of labor and machinery for the most important forest operations in forest stands under Central European conditions. To create such models, we used data from forest enterprises, manual time studies, and the literature. This work presents a decision support tool that estimates the wood harvesting productivities of 12 different kinds of forest operations under Central European conditions. It includes forest operations using chainsaws, harvesters, skidders, forwarders, chippers, cable and tower yarders, and helicopters. In addition, the tool covers three models for wood volume estimation. The tool is written in Java and available open-source under the Apache License. This work shows how the tool can be used by describing its graphical user interface (GUI) and its application programming interface (API) that facilitates bulk processing of scientific data. Carefully selected default values allow estimations without knowing all input variables in detail. Each model is accompanied by an in-depth documentation where the forest operation, input variables, formulas, and statistical background are given. We conclude that HeProMo is a very useful tool for applications in forest practice, research, and teaching.

Marktverhalten öffentlicher Forstbetriebe in Graubünden und im Aargau

We present production-, industrial-, and institutional economic approaches to analyse the market behaviour of public forest enterprises in the Cantons Aargau and Graubünden. The goal is to improve the understanding of the market behaviour of wood market participants, and to assess the availability of wood under different conditions. The analyses are based on surveys as well as choice and trust experiments. Besides structural forest characteristics, forest economic aspects as well market structures and institutional particularities are presented. Comparing the study cantons reveals that not only the intensity of utilization varies, but also the preferred marketing channel structures. While in Graubünden about 80% of the stem wood is sold via bundling organisations and forest contractors, in Aargau direct selling prevails with about 70%. Long-term business relations dominate in both cantons. The presented results feed into a computer-based analysis of various wood market situations.

Energieholzpotenziale im Schweizer Wald

In this article the wood energy potential of the Swiss forest is estimated on the basis of the third Swiss forest inventory (elicitations from 2004 till 2006). The estimation is based on four scenarios of usage intensity and on two wood market situations. Furthermore, the wood energy potentials are analysed by production regions, forest ownership, strength classes, tree compartments, harvesting methods and costs. The minimum technical potential in Switzerland is 3.1 million m3 of solid wood and brushwood per year (usage scenario: “as before”, not very energy-wood-friendly market), the maximum is 7.3 million m3 per year (usage scenario: “75% more usage”, which is associated with a significant reduction in stocks; very energy-wood-friendly market). As a rough benchmark we can assume a technical potential of 4 million m3 of solid wood and brushwood, which can be used on average without any reduction in stocks. Actually about 60% of it is currently harvested. The article shows that while additional energy wood potentials can be tapped, the energy wood can only make a small contribution to the total Swiss energy production, which is moreover relatively expensive to implement. Therefore an efficient and value-added use of the resource is especially important.