Costs Of Harvesting Beetle Killed Lodgepole Pine In Eastern Oregon PDF Download

The mountain pine beetle has impacted over 5 million hectares of pine forests in the Rocky Mountains region in the United States. Although some beetle-killed stands are available for salvage harvesting, there are many uncertainties in harvesting beetle-killed stands including safety, costs, recoverable products and their values. These uncertainties impose limitations on the ability of land managers to make timely decisions regarding beetle-killed stand management. This study aimed to quantify the difficulty of harvesting operations in beetle-killed forest stands with various downed-tree proportions. A detailed time study was conducted on a whole tree clear-cut harvest using a ground-based system in western Montana in August 2015. The effects of downed-trees on machine productivity and cost were analyzed using the collected field data. Our results indicated that tree conditions, including standing or down, not only significantly affected the productivity of the feller-buncher, but also affected the unit costs and productivity of the entire harvesting system, changing of the bottleneck machine in a combined felling, skidding and delimbing operation. This research also provided insight into how optimized system configuration may help cope with the increase of harvesting cost caused by the temporal changes in beetle-killed stand conditions, allowing forest managers and practitioners to understand the potential impact of delayed stand management decisions on harvesting costs and outcomes.