Tree harvesting on soft ground

Possibly as a result of climate change, the time span when the ground is frozen seems to get shorter, even in the boreal forests of northern Sweden. A consequence is that more harvesting has to be done on soft ground. Thus ground damages increases and some stands might even become difficult to harvest. Measures should therefore be taken to increase all year around accessibility to stands that are planned to be harvested. In this project, focus will be on how to determine and improve bearing capacity, and thus accessibility, in stands on soft ground.

• One comparable study between El-Forest F15 and Valmet 860 to determine how the differences in drive- and steers systems will affect the bearing capacity and ground damages. 
• Develop a model based on forestry register data and terrain indices to detect weak areas in the boreal forest during early summer.
• Computer simulation to study the bearing capacity and accessibility with a LTB-bogie compared to a conventional bogie. 
• One comparable study to verify the result from the computer simulation of the LTB-bogie.
• Study on how the attenuation on the load on a forwarder impacts the ground.