GIS applications in forest operations and road network planning: An overview over the last two decades

A systematic literature review was settled to investigate the application of GIS in terms of methods, complexity and accuracy to support decision on forestry operations and forest road network planning. A comprehensive search for relevant studies was performed to retrieve as many relevant international scientific publications dealing with forestry operations and forest road network planning in the period 1996–2015. The analysis was based on the development of a systematic literature review comprising three steps:  implementation of the database searches by well-defined search terms  identification of all the publications meeting the requirements of the search terms by abstract  choice of the most relevant publications analysis of the contents. In this review, »GIS and forest operations« includes all the descriptors dealing with GIS ap- plied to support forest operations decision and analysis, while »GIS and forest roads« includes all the papers dealing with the analysis, management and planning of forest road or forest road networks. A total of 372 references and 82 publications were selected for the analysis as they were clearly in conformity with the review topics (GIS applications in forest operations and road network planning). The analysis showed that GIS has also been applied successfully and unambiguously to har- vesting and transportation engineering in forest operations management. Further to the pre- vailing use concerning applications to support tactical planning, a significant number of recent publications have turned successfully to GIS applied at operational level. Again, despite the prevailing use concerning applications to support tactical planning, a significant number of recent publications have also turned successfully to GIS applied at operational level with the topics of Forest Operations Management in terms of optimization, productivity and safety analysis. By considering the recent evolution and improvement of GIS technology and the increasing availability of spatial data, as well their improvement in quality and resolution, the application of GIS in forest harvesting and transportation engineering as well as in forest operations management will expand in the near future.