Harvest operations on soft soils can be particularly challenging in order to respect site and soil disturbance guidelines as well as operational requirements. To address the challenges of operating on soft soils, FPInnovations has worked on solutions designed to reduce disturbance on weak soils while minimizing implementation and investment costs by using machines already being used in the operation.
This calculator tool has been developed to help member, partners, and contractors calculate costs by forestry machine, transport costs and block characteristics.
Ribbonless navigation systems offer the potential to reduce block layout costs while also improving operator productivity. We conducted a short field trial to test the accuracy of two available systems as well as identify challenges and best practices for companies looking to implement ribbonless navigation into their operation. The results highlight the importance of ongoing training and a clear set of operation wide guidelines and practices to get the maximum value out of an onboard ribbonless navigation system.
Mobile terrestrial LiDAR (MTL) systems have the potential to identify individual stems and serve as the basis for autonomous or semi -autonomous machine navigation. A small scale field trial was conducted to determine the accuracy with which a MTL system could map and extract stem positions and characteristics such as DBH. The trial yielded operationally accurate data at distances less than 15m, however, the study highlighted the need to optimize acquisition geometry to satisfy the model’s need for more ground reference points at further distances.
The study investigated the impact of various data acquisition settings of a mobile LiDAR system on stem attributes such as DBH. Our trials in plantation and complex stands provided best LiDAR acquisition settings for future operational implementation in a context of real time ‘vision’ for forestry machines.
