According to Rayonier New Zealand’s Philip Elworthy, the new Cable Harvesting Planning Solution (CHPS) will help foresters in New Zealand and possibly around the world, to harvest logs from very steep plantations more efficiently. This announcement was made to delegates at a forestry geographic information systems conference organised by Scion in Rotorua.
Some steep terrain harvesting was already taking place in New Zealand, but most of this planting occurred in the early 1990s and would be ready for harvest in the next five to 10 years, creating “huge challenges” for harvest planners, said Elworthy.
On this type of land, this is generally done by cable harvesting, where felled trees are lifted on cables to a central hauler that can be cost effectively reached by trucks. CHPS combines planning software with Esri ArcGIS software to allow planners to model a plantation and configure the most effective locations in which to position the hauler and cables for least environmental impact.
CHPS has been developed by Rayonier, Geographic Business Solutions (GBS) and Atlas Technology, with input from various industry group, including Rotorua’s Scion crown research institute. It will be presented in the United States next month at a conference organised by Esri.
-The Daily Post, April 27, 2012
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