Abstract
In the last years, there has been a growing need to improve forest-wood chain concerning all three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social). Using electronic systems, in particular GIS, GNSS, and various kinds of sensors related to forest harvesting, is clearly one of the most powerful instruments to reach this aim. The contribution of these tools to forest operation is wide and various. One of the most important application was integrating ICT and GPS/GNSS on-board systems on modern forest machines. This allowed one to ensure multiple benefits to forest operation field. On the one hand, electronic systems, and particularly GIS, could be used to improve forest harvesting with a previous planning of the skid trails network, in order to minimize utilization impacts and risks for operators, ensuring at the same time high work productivity. Moreover, GIS developed files could also be implemented in modern forest machine GPS/GNSS systems, helping forest machines operators to move only along a designed skid trails network or making it possible to avoid restricted access areas. On the other hand, modern forest machines could be equipped with complex and accurate sensors that are able to determine, register, and share information about wood biomass quantity and quality and even undertake economic evaluation of stumpage value. Finally, the input and output of these systems and sensors could be implemented in a decision support system (DSS) ensuring the best silvicultural and operative alternative from a sustainable forest management point of view. A detailed review of the contribution of electronics in the development of forest operations is provided here.
Highlights
The growing interest in environmental and social services of forests has led to an increase in the importance of the forest world and to a greater complexity of its systems [1].This becomes even more important considering the changes that the European forest sector has undergone in latest years
In order to gain a logic scheme of presentation, the results were categorized in four main macro areas: geographic information system (GIS) applications, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) instruments, machine sensors, and smartphone applications
The high complexity related to the science of electronics and its applications makes it difficult to have a clear differentiation about the four macro area selected
Summary
The growing interest in environmental and social services of forests has led to an increase in the importance of the forest world and to a greater complexity of its systems [1]. Recent advancements have led to an increase in employment of analytical and communication tools in forestry, concerning data from satellite, airborne, unmanned aerial vehicles, global positioning systems, and many sensors, devices, and other informatic tools [1] For this reason, precision forestry, and all other sectors related, can represent the new direction for a better forest management; this approach is focused on information and supports economic, environmental, and sustainable decisions by using high technology sensing and analytical/digital tools. One of the prerequisites of sustainable forest management (SFM) is to minimize the negative impact of harvesting on the environment without limiting work productivity [4,5,6] Considering this as a review focused on particular electronic instruments like GIS, GNSS, and sensors linked to the operative phase of a forest yard, could turn out to be very interesting for the reader. Of them were not completely related to the addressed topic, and for a proper
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