Abstract
Afforestation and reforestation operations constitute an important part of the forest management, being crucial for the sustainability of forests. In such operations, there are three options to prepare the planting holes: manual, partly mechanized, and fully mechanized. Given the high cost of mechanized planting and the ergonomic issues of manual planting, one option which is worth exploring is using of augers, because they have the potential to mitigate and/or eliminate intense physical effort and aspects of some of the ergonomic problems. This study examines the early survival of seedlings following the use of augers to prepare the planting pits. Working time, fuel consumption and physical quality of the pits were evaluated on nine sites for two drill types differentiated by their diameter (150 vs. 200 mm). Time consumption was systematically higher when using the larger drill, while fuel consumption was not found to be statistically different. The larger drill systematically produced pits characterized by less physical quality in terms of resistance to penetration and shear strength, but the early survival of seedlings was higher when using this drill size. Survival probability modeled by means of logistic regression showed that pit size was among the factors that may affect the early survival of seedlings. The study concludes that the larger drill would be more appropriate to plant seedlings, but further studies should be arranged to see if long-term survival would be affected in this case.
Highlights
Planting new forests and restocking of harvested areas constitute an important part of the forest management, contributing to the global sustainability of forests
The pits were drilled in unprepared soils, with moisture contents decreasing as a function of depth and varying between 8.74% and 24.58%
In what concerns the time consumption, and by excluding those field tests in which the results were affected by some particular conditions that are not common to the Romanian practical guidelines [31], this study showed that the cycle time (CT) varied between approximately 8–12 s for D150 and between approximately 11–17 s for D200
Summary
Planting new forests and restocking of harvested areas constitute an important part of the forest management, contributing to the global sustainability of forests. Forests 2018, 9, 665 when employing the use of mechanized planting there is a need to ensure that the length of the planting window is wide enough to ensure the cost-effectiveness of the machines used [3], which are expensive [3,4]. Numerous factors, such as the high operational costs of mechanized planting, the need to further develop the machines’ design to improve their cost-effectiveness [4], productivity rates that are comparable to that of manual planting [4,5] (or even less [6]), differences in planting quality [7], and some terrain-related limiting factors which confine the use of most planting machines to flatlands [2], have resulted in the current limited use of mechanized planting [4,8,9]. The comparability of the planting quality of mechanized and manual operations is still debated, with some results indicating a better quality resulting from the latter option [2]
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