TIMBER HARVESTING

Harvesting is the final phase as well as the beginning of a new forest or business cycle that usually extends over several decades. Forest harvest operations are usually the most expensive aspect in the forest business, both economically and environmentally.

The changes from a purely extractive activity and profession towards one that recognizes the value and critical contribution forested ecosystems make to the quality of life is nothing short of a true odyssey. Those issues are exemplified in three statements over the decades that still hold true today and have not lost any significance. The cross currents a forest engineer is faced with when designing forest harvest operations is best captured in the quotes below:

Which product of the same weight has a lower value, and at the same time, creates more emotions during its harvest than, say, coal or wheat?"

Wessley, 1853, an Austrian forestry official, exasperated about the public's involvement in management decisions relating to forest operations public issues and concerns, engineering & operational, and environmental & ecological issues then and now

"Harvesting the woods requires more capital and labor than any other phase of forest work, and is therefore the principal business of the woods."

N.C. Brown, 1934

Forest operations are capital intensive and with the on-going mechanization are even more so than in the past. We see a replacement of the human work force with "smart technology" that shift the human input towards higher and higher levels of technical knowledge and skills, operating ever-more complex and expensive equipment with less and less manpower.

"Most of the problems, environmental and otherwise, of timber production forestry are directly or indirectly associated with logging."

D.M. Smith, in Seaton et al., 1973, Presidential Report on the environmental impact of forest management activities.

Forest operations in the past were strictly extractive with no regards to other resource issues since resources were perceived as limitless and abundant with little value. There has been nothing less than a dramatic shift from those views toward one of multiple resource management and land stewardship. Operations today have to meet ecological and economical goals in order to be sustainable. It is in this area that forest engineers have to find the designs and processes which fulfill the multifaceted desires and needs of society.

A solid grounding in design principles, covering equipment and harvest operations, assessment of safety issues and environmental impact assessment are all part of the regular job when designing timber harvest operations. The forest engineer must clearly understand the objectives of the forest management plan and in the case of conflicting objectives and constraints, limits of acceptable performance must be established for environmental and other forest values. The forest engineer must then maximize the forest values within these constraints.