A Review on Decision Processes for Wood Harvesting in Turkish Forestry

This review article provides an overview of decision-making processes for harvesting of wood based forest products, which should include criteria that are environmentally friendly, technically feasible, economically viable, socially and institutionally acceptable. The decision-making on wood harvesting is a complex task that requires supporting management strategies for, not only satisfy socio-economic expectations but also handle environmental considerations. The changing paradigms and developing technologies related to forestry have a significantly impact on the contents of the decisions. In order to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the decisions, it is necessary to analyze the issues taken into consideration and focused in decision making processes. The aim of the article was to demonstrate the state-of-the-art of the decision making processes in Turkish forestry and review the contents of decisions in terms of adaptation to changing forestry operations management and technologies. Depending on the current status, the decision process related to wood harvesting system was firstly divided into two sub-process as managerial (administrative) and operational (technical), and then, each process was separately analyzed. To analyze managerial process in forest administrations, it was used a job analysis method by following of hierarchical and ordinary the paper-work procedure. For analysis of operational process, process mapping and work flowcharts were used by means of work study methods belonging to previous researches. It was found that the decisions were economical oriented (budget balanced) and societal sophisticated in administrative process. In the operational step, the harvest operations were based on technical and economic completion with basic and to moderate technologies. Environmental issues were not completely prioritized as a primary subject in any of the decision-making processes, yet.