Mountain pine beetle infested forests in the Rocky Mountain region raise complicated economic, environmental, and social impacts and pose severe forest management challenges to land managers and public and private landowners. Harvesting infested forest stands provides an opportunity to utilize otherwise wasted resources, mitigate economics losses to landowners, and generate...
Operational studies are necessary to support production and management decisions of forest industries. A time study (TS) approach is widely used in timber harvesting operations to understand the performance of individual harvesting machines as well as the entire system. However, several limitations of the TS approach include the use of...
Two ground-based timber harvesting methods have been commonly used for beetle-kill salvage treatments after a bark beetle epidemic in northern Colorado. A lop and scatter method uses a mobilized stroke delimber to delimb and buck trees at the stump, leaving tree tops and limbs on the forest floor, while a...