John Sessions Books

Forest road operations encompass the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure necessary for transporting forest products from roadside to mill or port. Ineffective road management can undermine the economic viability of forestry and negatively affect water quality and wildlife habitats. Sustainable forest management focuses on balancing efficient transportation with minimizing environmental impacts. Proper planning and control over road location, design, construction, and maintenance can significantly reduce the direct impacts of forest roads, particularly in temperate forests. However, tropical regions present unique challenges such as prolonged wet periods, intense rainfall, swamps, and limited rock for road surfacing. This book consolidates information on road planning, location, design, construction, and maintenance to promote environmentally sound practices in tropical forests. It addresses the specific challenges of tropical road operations, showcases proven techniques, and explores emerging technologies. Aimed at forest engineers and those involved in tropical forest management, it includes numerical examples to clarify graphs, procedures, and formulas. The content is organized into 11 chapters, covering various aspects of road management from design objectives to practices aimed at controlling environmental impacts.

Harvesting includes all the activities to fell trees and remove them from the forest to the roadside for loading and transport from the forest. Harvesting and extraction operations are the activities that generally cause the most significant impacts on forest managed for timber production. Sustainable forest mana- ment is concerned with management of forests in such a way as to control the impacts associated with harvesting and timber extraction. Harvesting and extraction for sustainable timber production in natural forests are not to be confused with logging associated with land conversion activities such as c- version to permanent or temporary agriculture, pasture land, or domesticated trees. Much of the impact of harvesting and extracting can be reduced through proper planning and control of harvesting operations using principles, s- tems, and techniques common to temperate forests. However, many areas of the tropics pose unique operating conditions: heat, high humidity, hi- intensity precipitation, occurrence of certain diseases, and lack of rock for su- able road surfacing. In natural forests, clear felling is rarely practiced, and many species are the rule with few commercial species on any hectare; thus, log removals per unit area are low.