Abstract
Steep country harvesting has been identified as the main bottleneck to achieving greater profitability in the forestry sector of New Zealand and Australia. An improvement of efficiency, work safety and environmental sustainability should be realized by developing an advanced steep terrain timber harvesting system based on innovative Austrian technology. To identify the best suitable configuration of a cable yarder for steep terrain harvesting, user preferences based on an online survey (conjoint analysis) have been evaluated to answer the following questions: (1) What attributes of a new yarder design are most important to consumers? (2) Which criteria do stakeholders consider when selecting a cable yarder? (3) What are the weights representing the relative importance of criteria? Using eight specific design scenarios a fourth question, being which cable yarder concept is the best, was also answered. This case study shows that conjoint analyses is an effective tool to assess, rate and subsequently integrate design characteristics. Based on the results of the analysis, a cable yarder prototype will be manufactured in Austria and transferred to New Zealand for testing and demonstration.
Highlights
Mountain forests represent 23% of total Earth forest cover [1]
A pool of several existing or potential cable yarder configurations are called scenarios or alternatives. These scenarios will be evaluated by criteria using a conjoint analysis
Pairwise comparisons performed by conjoint analysis generated a ranking of the attributes for each participant P1-P14 (Table 3)
Summary
Mountain forests represent 23% of total Earth forest cover [1]. Forests play a significant role in the mountain economy by ensuring employment in several economic fields [2]. Proper utilization of mountainous forests is critical to ensure sustainability, protect the soil from erosion, conserve water and maintain a rich biodiversity. Forest operations in mountain areas are seldom performed by fully mechanized systems. The sector is still characterized by manual felling, while extraction of timber (logs, stems or whole trees) is typically done by cable yarders. Steep terrain can be defined by slopes over
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