Estimating damaged understory based on collisions with harvested trees during final cutting of a shelterwood

ABSTRACT

We investigated whether collisions of harvested trees with understory might explain the presence of damaged understory spanning an entire forest compartment. Specifying understory damage caused by harvesting operations is necessary to compare the economic advantages of any residual understory against the high expenses of shelterwood harvesting. Existing models for explaining understory damage were unclear and unable to quantify the amount of residual understory. Therefore, we used collisions between felled trees and the understory as explanatory variables and discovered that the collisions may be spatial indicators; however, we have not yet evaluated whether these indicators are applicable across large areas. In this paper, we looked at another final cutting and used the collisions to estimate the damage to the understory again. Results showed that the coordinates of collisions may spatially describe the state of the understory after final cutting, even at an entire forest compartment. This practice suggests that we can intentionally mitigate damage to the understory by avoiding physical impacts to the understory during final cutting. We expect to compare the silvicultural benefits of residual understory and harvesting costs spatially.

KEYWORDS:

• Shelterwood
• Chamaecyparis obtusa
• reforestation cost
• geospatial information

Acknowledgements

We thank the Nanshin Forest Office of the Japan Forest Agency, students of the Faculty of Agriculture at Shinshu University and Mr Gen Takei, for their extraordinary cooperation and patience in conducting the field research that formed the foundation of this study. We thank the editor, the associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. We would like to thank Enago (www.enago.jp) for English language editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that this study was conducted without any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as potential conflicts of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shinshu Foundation for Promotion of Agricultural and Forest Science, and JSPS KAKENHI under grant number JP20H03023