Timber Harvesting Damage Prediction for Sustainable Forest Management

Sustaining forest resources has always been a major challenge to many countries with regard to poor timber harvesting practices. The initiative to conserve the forest is especially hard when it comes to managing the harvesting activities in the tropical rainforest. As tropical rainforest is condensed with trees of multi ages and species, the trees are of commercial and non-commercial types, harvesting of a specific tree must be carefully planned so that the damage caused by the harvested tree to the surrounding stands could be minimized. Fallen trees and broken trunks are reported to be the most common fatal damage caused by the tree trunk and the crown of the felling tree. As part of our conservation strategy for sustaining tropical forest, this initial study started with observing and keeping the tree-mapping data for a particular tropical forest in Malaysia such as the (x,y) tree coordinates, tree heights, diameter at breast height (DBHs), tree species and prices into the database. This data will then be used as input to the algorithm that is designed for predicting the damage caused by trunk of the felling tree at the specified degree. The result of the algorithm will identify the most feasible tree felling direction--that is the felling degree which will give the minimum damage cost.