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NFM, Volume 40: 59–70.
Preliminary note
https://doi.org/10.5552/nms.2019.6

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Abstract

Well planned forest traffic infrastructure, which is optimally integrated into the forest ecosystem, represents one of the basic prerequisites for the rational management of the forest ecosystem. The total amount of forest roads, their location and their specified technical characteristics must be sufficient for the best possible forest management. If the forest traffic infrastructure is properly distributed in the area, it enables all the tasks covered by forest management plans, with minimal costs for their construction and maintenance. This paper presents the current state of primary accessibility of the Management Unit Crno jezero – Marković rudine and gives guidelines to achieve very good primary relative accessibility. The processing of field data was performed with the ArcGIS 10.4 and QGIS 2.18.20 computer programs. It has been established that the classical forest openness in the studied Management Unit was 13.66 km/1000 ha, which does not even meet the minimum specified classical openness, this being 15 km/1000 ha for mountainous/hilly areas. When analysing the results of primary relative openness, a very similar situation was found as in the case of classical openness; the primary relative openness was 45.05 %, which is insufficient. Furthermore, the existing mean geometric distances of timber extraction were analysed separately for each compartment and for the entire managemnt unit, which was 258.74 m. A careful planning resulted in the design of a total of 53.05 km of new forest roads, which ultimately resulted in an increase in the classical forest openness amounting to 22.82 km/1000 ha and an increase in the primary relative openness amounting to 75.8 %, while the mean geometric distance of timber extraction was reduced to 140.55 m.

Key words: forest roads, relative forest openness, geometric distances of timber extraction, ArcGIS