Harvesting Coillte's forests: The right tree at the right time.

Abstract

Coillte Teoranta harvested approximately 1.4 million m³ of timber in 1990. By 2010 this annual harvest volume will increase to 3.5 million m³. This increased harvest volume, which largely will have to be exported, either as finished products or as round timber, has focused attention on the necessity for efficiency and rationalisation in the overall timber industry. The Department of Forestry, University College Dublin, in co-operation with Coillte, has developed a number of prototype planning procedures , designed as decision-support tools for forest management . Their main function is to illustrate the possible benefits to the company of the integration of operations research techniques in both operational and strategic planning procedures. The area that this paper focuses on is timber allocation and transportation . Past procedures, changes that have been made up to the present and proposed future developments are illustrated with the aid of hypothetical examples, using data from Coillte's data bases.