Forest Road Network Planning with State of the Art Tools in a Private Forest District from Lower Austria

Abstract

Forest road network planning plays a crucial role in sustainable forest management. The goal of this paper is to develop a road network in a 400 ha forest from Lower Austria, in order to solve the problem of accessibility and to reduce the harvesting costs. State of the art tools RoadEng®, ESRI® Arc GIS and MS Office Excel® have been used. The designed forest road network consists of slope roads with total length of 17.11 km. The resulted road density in the project area is 42.77 m/ha and the road distance is 234 m. The construction costs are estimated to 36.80 €/m, and the harvesting costs have decreased from an average of 27.90 €/m3 before the road network was planned to an average of 22.60 €/m3 after planning the road network.