Reducing Industrial Impact on Forest Ecosystems by Improving the Organization of Harvesting Operations

Abstract

Forest industry has a direct impact on the natural environment, therefore, when setting technological requirements for forest machines an engineer should take into account the environmental implication of future operations. This problem is actual and still unsolved, mostly due to limited knowledge on quantitative estimation methods related to the evaluation of environmental impact. Hence, in this study, we made a simulation of forest operations technology enhancement. The aim was to increase the harvesting system output up to the leading machine capacity level to decrease the harvesting time. Using the simulating analysis, this study implements the numerical estimation of the impact caused by harvesting machines on the forest ecosystems. In particular, our results indicate that the absolute reduction of carbon oxide (CO) as a percentage of machines’ emission during the time was 8 to 21% depending on the yearly harvested volume.