Ground based systems are the main approach used for off-road timber transportation throughout the world. Estimates of terrain transportation costs are required for several forest planning problems and for assessment of harvesting contracts and forest land values. Methods for these calculations can be categorized into two groups. Methods based on average transportation distance predate computers...

Ungulate vehicle collisions (UVC) provoke serious damage, including human casualties, and a large number of measures have been developed around the world to avoid collisions. We analyse the main factors involved in UVC in a road network built in the absence of ungulates, where mitigation structures to avoid UVC were not adequately considered. Ungulate population greatly increased during the las...

In the automated design of road networks an important sub-task is the solution of an instance of the Steiner tree problem, a well known N P-hard problem. In this paper we present the experimental evaluation of a heuristic for the Steiner tree problem used in the design of low volume forest road networks. To evaluate a heuristic it is necessary to compare to the optimum value or a good lower bou...

The main problem of vehicle vibration comes from road roughness. An active suspension systempossesses the ability to reduce acceleration of sprung mass continuously as well as to minimizesuspension deflection, which results in improvement of tire grip with the road surface. Thus, braketraction control and vehicle maneuverability can be improved consider ably .This study developeda new active su...

This paper presents an approach for the automatic extraction of roads from digital aerial imagery. The approach makes use of several versions of the aerial image having different resolutions. Roads are modeled as a network of intersections and links between these intersections. For d ifferent so-called „global contexts" , i .e. , rural, forest, and urban area, the model describes relations betw...

Prevention and estimation of soil erosion from forest roads requires an understanding of how road design and maintenance affect sediment production. Seventyfour plots were installed on forest roads in the Oregon Coast Range to examine the relationship between sediment production and road attributes such as distance between culverts, road slope, soil texture, and cutslope height. An additional c...

A 13,451 ha forested catchment in SE Australia was instrumented for one year to quantify total instream exports of total suspended sediment (TSS) and total phosphorus (TP). 101 road-stream crossings were mapped and characterised in detail within the catchment to identify the properties of these road sections that connect directly to the stream network. Sediment and nutrient generation rates fro...