Evaluation of Forest Road Networks Located in Karadeniz Technical University Research and Practice Forest

Year 2015, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 15 - 20, 01.06.2015

Selcuk Gumus

Abstract

Forest
roads are in mutual interaction with many factors such as technical, economic
and environmental requirements. The evaluation of forest roads network has been
clarified by considering issues such as the accessibility to forest, the cost
of transportation and impact on the environment. In this study, evaluation of
future usage of existing forest roads have been aimed with taken into account
to all tasks in accordance with the sustainable forestry objectives. To reach
this goal, previously developed forest road evaluation and grading method was
tested in Karadeniz Technical University (KTU) Research and Practice Forest.
The total road length in the study area was 107+371 km which contained 27 road
segments. All forest roads in the study area were classified into four quality
classes (Class I: very good; Class II: good; Class III: bad; Class IV: very
bad) for the future use. After evaluating the forest road network, it was found
that 50.51% of the road was classified as Class II, while 31.09% and 18.39%
were classified as Class I and Class III, respectively. The results indicated
that there was no road segment under Class IV. The results suggested that the
forest road network of the KTU Research and Practice Forest was sufficient in
general regarding with the sustainable forestry goals. However, about 20% of
the road was found to be in bad quality status. It can be concluded that it is
necessary to implement urgent road repair in these segments based on forest
road evaluation and grading method. Thus, it would be very useful to implement
the road evaluation process described in this study in redesigning stage of
forest road networks.

Keywords

Forest roads, Road classes, Evaluation of forest roads, KTU

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