Abstract
A well-planned forest road network is essential for meeting the goal of sustainable forest management. Forest roads play a key role in commercial purposes, fire prevention, and recreational activities. The aim of this work was to apply precision forestry in the analysis of the forest network of two forest ownerships in Tuscany. A proposal was formulated based on the information obtained regarding future forest road construction. This proposal takes into consideration technical effectiveness and environmental sustainability, with particular attention paid to low-impact logging. Two systems were tested so as to gain a better comprehension of different technical approaches. One system was reported by other researchers and the other was developed by the authors of this paper. The aim was to provide a valid instrument and possible alternative for forest managers involved in decision making. This study highlights the importance of precision forestry, even on a small-scale technical application level in forest road planning, thus helping managers and owners during the decision-making process in forestry operations.
Highlights
Forest road network planning represents one of the major challenges in the perspective of a sustainable forest management [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The main aim of this work was to apply a precision forestry approach to analyze the forest road network of two forest ownerships located in the region of Tuscany
Two accessibility assessment systems were compared for a better comprehension of different technical approaches, one developed by Laschi et al [3] modifying the concept of the travel time criterion (TTC) described by Hippoliti [51] and the second one with a GIS implementation of the authors, called “real distance buffer criterion” (DBC)
Summary
Forest road network planning represents one of the major challenges in the perspective of a sustainable forest management [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. A road network may be used for transportation purposes of inhabitants, access to grazing lands, to improve and maintain water engineering structures, to improve wildlife habitat, for recreational activities, for natural hazard prevention and management, and for fire prevention and suppression [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] Taking into account these purposes, forest road planning aims to achieve a sustainable development of a network characterized by an increased multi-functionality [8,9,10,11]. Its planning requires a Forests 2018, 9, 277; doi:10.3390/f9050277 www.mdpi.com/journal/forests
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
