Cable Corridor Installation Times for European Yarders

Abstract

Cable yarding continues to be an efficient and effective harvesting system for the extraction of timber on steep terrain. Modern European silvicultural strategies result in smaller harvest areas, lower extraction volumes and a shift from clear-cut to thinning operations or single tree extraction. Yarder installation time has, especially as a proportion to the extraction time, increased significantly, resulting in higher extraction costs. This study recorded the set-up and take-down time of 79 cable yarder installations. Another 76 installation times were taken from previously published time studies, for a total sample size of 155. The factorial study design differentiated uphill-or downhill yarding, yarder size and whether or not it was the first installation at a landing, or subsequent parallel installation from the same landing area. The covariates recorded were corridor length, terrain slope, number and height of intermediate supports, and number of forest workers. Both a set-up and take-down time models were developed. This will help estimate future cable installation time requirements, and more importantly, provide improved cost estimates for the new silvicultural treatments.

LCA of environmental and socio-economic impacts related to wood energy production in alpine conditions: Valle di Fiemme (Italy)

“…(Heinimann, 2004). Furthermore, cable yarder offers the benefit of environmentally friendly extraction, with limited impacts on the environment, forest soil and the residual stand (Stampfer et al, 2006;Visser and Stampfer, 1998). Cable yarder has already been used in bioenergy supply in Italian mountain areas (Zimbalatti and Proto, 2009).…”

Time consumption and productivity of a medium size mobile tower yarder in downhill and uphill configurations: a case study in Czech Republic

“…Nowadays it is well recognised that cable yarding represents a low impact system for extracting wood in steep terrain both on soil as well on residual stand trees (Stampfer et al, 2006). Again, on steep terrain, cable yarding could be a cost-effective alternative to building an extensive network of skidding trails and results in a much lower site impact compared to ground-based logging (Worrell et al, 2011;Stanczykiewicz et al, 2015), as well it seems to be competitive in terms of CO2 in comparison to semi-mechanised ground-based logging (Cosola et al, 2016).…”

Road network optimization using heuristic and linear programming

“…Models developed by Stampfer et al (2006) were used to estimate installation cost. Stampfer's models estimate the time to set up and take down cable yarding settings in Austria for different systems.…”

“…Road construction costs per m 3 were computed using road density, harvesting volume of 167 m 3 .ha -1 , and average road construction cost of 35 €.m -1 . Installation costs were calculated using the time prediction model developed by Stampfer et al (2006), hourly cost and average harvested volume per corridor. The harvesting volume per corridor ranged from 82 to 170 m 3 , with an average of 121.2 m 3 for the sites studied by Limbeck-Lilienau (2002).…”