Background and Objective

In mechanized timber harvest, logging operations take place with heavy vehicles whose mass has been increasing for years. In addition to the increase in performance to meet the growing demand for wood, the impact on the ecosystem is also increasing at the same time. Especially the soil of the logging roads is disturbed in its physical, but also chemical and biological properties in the long term. The protection and preservation of soil functional properties requires various strategies, including the weather-adapted driving of sensitive soils. The aim of the planned project is to investigate the seasonal dynamics of the soil water balance and to derive forecasts for the spatially and temporally differentiated distribution of the water content in skid trails.

Target Group

Science and research, forest and soil research community, forestry enterprises and associations, forestry consultants, education, politics.

Approach

• Selection of 3 forestry used sites of different substrates and tree species
• Recording of the soil physical status quo condition by taking undisturbed soil samples
• Installation of a soil hydrological monitoring to record soil water content and tension
• Monitoring of climatological boundary conditions
• Cloud-based transmission of measurement data
• Monitoring of harvesting measures with simultaneous consideration of the current soil moisture content
• Model simulation based on the LWF-Brook90 model for short-term forecasting of soil water content

Our Research Questions

• How do logging roads used for forestry differ in terms of their annual soil water balance in from unused forest soil?
• What are the soil hydrological properties of different sites with different soil type and tree species composition?
• Can critical conditions of trafficability be predicted and can these be taken into account in machine deployment planning?