Original scientific paper
A GIS Approach to Analyzing Off-Road Transportation: a Case Study in Sweden
Sima Mohtashami
; The Forest Research Institute of Sweden SE-90183 Uppsala Science Park SWEDEN
Isabelle Bergkvist
; The Forest Research Institute of Sweden SE-90183 Uppsala Science Park SWEDEN
Björn Löfgren
; The Forest Research Institute of Sweden SE-90183 Uppsala Science Park SWEDEN
Staffan Berg
; The Forest Research Institute of Sweden SE-90183 Uppsala Science Park SWEDEN
Abstract
Off-road driving in logging operations began in Sweden in the 1960s. Those operations took place at final fellings during winter on prepared ice roads that protected the soil and mitigated possible soil damage. Today logging operations are fully mechanized and performed all year round. Thus forest strip roads may suffer severe impacts from off-road operations. Soil disturbances may have physical, chemical, biological, hydrological, and economic effects and affect the water quality. Similar problems are encountered in other regions, where driving occurs close to watercourses or vulnerable areas. The EU Water Directive has an impact on operations in forests, creating an incentive for improvements. Ongoing efforts in the design of vehicles and equipment are likely to improve operations. Soil damage can be avoided by applying GIS-based planning techniques, and by taking advantage of soil radar-scanned and ground laser-scanned data sets, which would facilitate safer off-road driving to a great extent.
A case study in southern Sweden revealed that the use of digital planning for the improvement of strip roads in order to avoid vulnerable terrain made forwarding of timber more profitable.
Using elevation, slope, aspect and soil type digital layers, a model has been created in ‘model builder’ environment of ArcGIS to build up a cost-index surface, which classifies the terrain suitability for driving into five different levels. Implementing distance analysis, the model designs the least costly roads connecting any desired destination to the landing point. The result of this study reveals that this kind of pre-planning tool can mitigate ecological dam ages to soil and water and at the same time it can also assist decision makers to evaluate diffferent possible choices of road layouts regarding preserving sensitive regions in forest lands.
Keywords
GIS-based decision support system; Digital Terrain Model (DTM); ground damage; forest operations; forwarding; planning; rutting; soil
Hrčak ID:
116845
URI
Publication date:
3.9.2012.
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