Planning logging systems through site analysis

Strategic planning for defining forest operations and for supporting decision on the most appropriate forest equipments requires deep spatial analyses, especially in mountains condition where the terrain and the forest stand characteristics change in space and in time. In order to evaluate the feasibility of forest logging systems and consequently the estimation of their costs, a rough quantitative analysis was carried out by GIS models. Since these GIS models, previously developed, have evidenced different drawbacks associated to the low quality of digital data representing forest stand volume, forest road network and terrain characteristics, topographic surveys were used in order to reduce the gap of the quality of the digital data. In fact, it was evidenced that spatial methods for enhancing the resolution and accuracy of the model must require the support of global positioning analysis, in order to reduce so inappropriate rough results and consequently to improve the quality of the spatial investigation. Topographic surveys with global positioning equipments were tested as primary investigations to link field site data to the digital spatial model. With the aim to define a Decision Support System apt to be an useful tool for planning forest operations, a methodology based on the integration between a GIS model and field surveys was developed in a northern Italian alpine district.