Original scientific paper
A Low-Investment Fully Mechanized Operation for Pure Selection Thinning of Pine Plantations
Raffaele Spinelli
orcid.org/0000-0001-9545-1004
; CNR – Ivalsa, via Madonna del Piano Pal. F I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, ITALY
Carla Nati
; CNR – Ivalsa, via Madonna del Piano Pal. F I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, ITALY
Abstract
Over the last decades many Mediterranean sites were planted with conifers, which offered fast growth, good fibre quality and the capacity to grow on poor soils. If not thinned, these stands cannot develop strong and healthy trees and they become vulnerable to stress agents. The authors designed a complete operation for the thinning of conifer plantations under favourable terrain conditions by a feller-buncher, a farm tractor equipped with a skidding grapple, mounted on the three-point hitch and a trailer-mounted drum chipper. The whole investment in mechanical equipment was very limited, in the order of _ 338,000, including the truck and a tractor to move the chipper. Felling and extraction were quite balanced, with an average productivity around 40 trees hour–1. A spreadsheet was developed in order to determine the effect of tract size on biomass delivered cost, a crucial issue in Non Industrial Private Forests (NIPF) where the problems inherent to the generally small tract size are compounded by the limited quantity and value of the harvest.
Keywords
feller-buncher; Non-Industrial Private Forestry; biomass; whole-tree harvesting; thinning
Hrčak ID:
47879
URI
Publication date:
11.12.2009.
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