A guide to loading logs
Agroforestry bibliography
Planning forestation
A computer model of global forestry
How forests interact
New Sahel bibliography
How to log in high country
Forest management in Côte d'Ivoire
Self-loading winch trucks. Prepared by J.L. Wilson of J.G. Groome & Associates in collaboration with the Logging and Transport Branch of the FAO Forestry Department. Rome, FAO. 26 pp., illustrative drawings and tables.
SELF-LOADING WINCH TRUCKS a new FAO publication
This document on self-loading winch trucks is intended for use by logging personnel in various parts of the world who require a relatively inexpensive loading and transport system for forest products, and whose operations cannot be or have not been able to afford to construct or maintain a roading system suited to highway vehicles.
The document provides the specifications and loading procedures of three vehicle layouts - shortwood (less than 2.5 m in length), sawlogs (3 to 5 m) and longwood (9 to 12 m) - and should cover the transport of most types of forest products, enabling those requiring vehicles for roundwood transport to make a choice of equipment best suited to their needs. The book provides indicative prices, which should enable cost estimates for purchase to be made; it also names a few manufacturers who could supply suitable equipment.
The specifications provided are in sufficient detail for use for direct purchase or to call for tenders once the type of operations has been determined; or, in the case of ancillary equipment, to enable it to be purchased with the truck unit, from a local or a specialist manufacturer or supplier.
Agroforestry: a new annotated bibliography, no. F24. Compiled by Paul Richards. Oxford, Commonwealth Forestry Bureau. 1985 Price: £7.25 plus 10 percent to cover postage and handling.
This book is a collection of references covering the integration of social forestry and agriculture in agrosilvicultural, silvipastoral and agrosilvipastoral systems. Records were taken from the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux data base from January 1973 to February 1982. The bibliography is available from Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, Farnham House, Farnham Royal, Slough SL2 3BN, UK.
Strategies and designs for afforestation, reforestation and tree planting. K F. Wiersum, ed. Wageningen Netherlands, Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation (PUDOC). 1984. ISBN 90-220-0840-1. 432 pp. Price: US$60 (hardback); US$16 (paperback) for developing countries only.
Reviewed by Dr J. Burley
This book is a valuable contribution to the source literature on forestry development. It represents the proceedings of an international symposium, "Let there be forest", held in 1983 to mark 100 years of forestry education and research in the Netherlands. The organizing committee is to be congratulated on the content of the symposium and for arranging for experienced, generally well-known speakers/authors who presented information and ideas highly relevant to the theme. The editor and publishers deserve praise for the high standard of editing, with few, minor typographical errors, and for the uniform style and good quality of printing and binding. Although some of the information has appeared elsewhere, it is in scattered journals, bulletins and agency reports, not always easily accessible; this book provides an excellent compendium.
The long and complicated title could be replaced by "Planning forestation" (as defined in the introduction), for this is what the symposium considered. The committee wished to examine advantages and constraints of different forestation systems (afforestation, reforestation and tree-planting) to provide a nucleus of information and ideas on successful strategies and designs for creating new forests and tree resources. The committee recognized the need for strategic, tactical and operational planning and invited papers on each of these, together with case-studies and papers describing basic planting techniques. Virtually all of these papers are relevant, although their grouping in the sessions and proceedings does not appear totally logical.
Setting the scene on the aims and objectives of forestation in development are three chapters by well-known international foresters. J.S. Spears (World Bank) reviews the role of forestation as a sustainable land use supplying wood needs in developing countries; J.E.M. Arnold (FAO) considers the aims and constraints of forestation for local community development; T.J. Peck (FAO/ECE) examines trends in consumption of forest products and their implications for forest plantation policies. These are supported by reviews of the effects of forestation on soil and water management (J. Evans) and biological diversity (G. Budowski), and by some seven case-studies ranging from biomass energy in Bangladesh to lessons learned from early plantings in the Sahel.
PLANTING SEEDLINGS IN ETHIOPIA a comprehensive volume on tree-planting
The section on diagnostic methodologies for forestation includes papers on land evaluation (H.F. Gelens), a review of all project diagnostic techniques (some of which will be unfamiliar to many foresters) by L. Pancel and C. Wiebecke, use of Landsat imagery (J. Gonzalez Durazo) and the ICRAF (International Council for Research in Agroforestry) diagnosis and design methodology for agroforestry by J.B. Raintree.
Specific analyses of forestation design components are concerned largely with silviculture and management failures (J.K. Jackson), economic assessment of industrial plantations (R.A. Sedjo), comparison of incentives (H. R. Gregerson), institutional arrangements (D.J. Palin), training and extension for community forestry (E.D. Pelinck et al.) and ecological stability (E.F. Brunig).
The final section considers all stages of planning and implementation of forest development in Java (Hartono et al.), the place of non-governmental organizations (A. Grainger), and the evolution of the present international forest policy and activities of development agencies, leading to a description of international and national action required on forestation (R. Levingston, formerly of FAO); the latter two papers include valuable lists of non-governmental organizations and national programmes of international cooperation in forestry.
Following discussion of the presented papers, the symposium issued a final document including many recommendations on increasing planting within and outside the forest, increasing donor assistance, and increasing public awareness, all within the context of appropriate, systematic planning and policies. The title of the symposium was "Let there be forest"; let there also be policy-makers, administrators and technicians with the time and wisdom to read and apply the lessons imparted in the symposium proceedings.
Commonwealth Forestry Review
The global forest sector: an analytic perspective. Markku Kallio, Dennis Dykstra & Clark Binkley. J.R. Wiley & Sons. 1986.
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) has completed a four-year project - whose efforts are reported in this book supported by more than 100 collaborators in 35 countries, aimed at developing the world's first comprehensive computer model of the global forest sector.
IIASA is a research organization supported by 16 scientific institutions from East and West, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (United States) and the USSR Academy of Sciences. The Institute, based in Laxenburg, near Vienna, was founded in October 1972 to promote international scientific collaboration.
The new Global Trade Model and associated data base are intended to be used by decision-makers in national and international agencies to analyse long-term structural changes in the forest sector and to evaluate policies that affect developments in the forest sector. The book includes the Model's results on world prices, trade, production and consumption for 16 timber products in 18 regions worldwide.
GAO TREE AMID MILLET IN THE NIGER information on the Sahel is accumulating
The base scenario assumed that, during the 50-year "projection horizon" of the Model, the average level of economic growth globally would be slightly lower than that of the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of this, the driving forces of population growth and increased income levels worldwide would result in strong future demand for most types of forest products. This implies a significant increase in the level of timber harvesting, particularly in North and South America and the USSR.
A valuable feature of the IIASA Global Trade Model is that all major assumptions and variables can be easily altered by future users of the model. This will enable users to evaluate, for example, the potential effect of changes in trade policy, in productive capacity investment, or in harvesting rates on the region's price competitiveness and trade volumes before such changes are implemented.
Participants at a recent International Conference on Structural Change in the Forest Sector (29 to 30 July 1985, Laxenburg) concluded that the IIASA Model represented a major step forward in understanding the forces that shape development in the forest sector and unanimously agreed the following:
· The Global Trade Model should now be implemented in as many countries as possible. To assist in the implementation process, the model data base and training have been available at IIASA since October 1985.· The implementation of the system in different countries will generate a need for ongoing network activity to exchange information about the results of regional implementation. Responsibility for network activity will be continued by IIASA in conjunction with the International Union of Forestry Research Organizations.
Interaction theory in forest ecology and management. Rolfe A. Leary. Forestry Sciences 19. The Hague, Nijhoff/Junk. 1985. 219 pp. Price: fl 120.00/£33.25 stg/US$39.50.
This book addresses a crucial concern of forest management: how to manage forests for economic efficiency, for ecosystem integrity, and for the biocentricist's concerns about species exclusion and extinction. The author argues that foresters must first reevaluate their view of forests. They must extend their traditional "trees are timber" commodity view beyond both the neutral "trees are more than timber" and the modern systems perspective that "everything is connected to everything else", to a perspective where relations (interactions) form the dominant reality and "things are subordinate to relations between things".
Leary gives an interdisciplinary synthesis of constructs from silviculture, forest economics and multiple-use forest management with ideas from philosophy (ontology, philosophy of science), mathematics (group algebra, Haskell's coordinate system), structuralism (Piaget's relational structuralism), population and community ecology, and conservation. He argues that the array of interactions produced by forest management practices is as important as the array of things. A new theory of indirect effects is developed and used to form a new exclusion principle that forms the basis for valuing interaction types.
DIVERSIFIED LANDSCAPE IN RURAL AFRICA a theory about how forests interact
Les forêts et la foresterie dans le Sahel Ouest-Africain: une bibliographie/Forests and forestry in the West African Sahel: a selected bibliography. Compiled by George F. Taylor 11 & Beth Ann Taylor. Institut du Sahel, Boîte postale 1530, Bamako, Mali. June 1984/November 1985. 207 pp.
This dual-language French-English bibliography was published by the Institut du Sahel in collaboration with the Social Development Planning Team of the United States Agency for International Development. It includes references from the eight member countries of the CILSS (Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel) - Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, the Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, the Niger and Senegal - as well as Nigeria and Sudan because "their contribution to forestry in the broader Sudano-Sahelian zone has been both important and longstanding".
The bibliography itself covers 152 pages and contains 1481 entries. It is followed by a geographical index which includes, for example, a list of the 168 different bibliographical items related to Senegal; a technical keyword index giving the total number of references to such items as "sericulture" (5), "land use" (86) and "living fences" (10); a species index listing references for the 102 different tree species mentioned in the bibliography; and a French-English key-word and acronym lexicon.
Winch and cable systems. Ivar Samset. Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1985. 539 pp., 544 pictures and drawings, 80 tables, 162 formulae and 28 examples of calculations. Price: US$60 (for students US$39.50).
Reviewed by Ulf Sandberg
A great share of the shrinking forest resources of the world is located in steep terrain. For most countries with such forests, it is a compelling necessity to use them for timber production. Often, one finds here the most fragile ecosystems, easily damaged by careless use of technology.
Forestry manufacturing has largely been concerned with machines that travel and do work on the ground, machines that it is normally not possible to use in steep country. Only a few countries have research institutes and machine manufacturers working with techniques for steep terrain. They are geographically dispersed and often specialized in local situations. A good book on "steep technology", reviewing engineering and production for logging in mountains, has until now not been published. Now it is here.
Ivar Samset, the leader in research in forest operations in Norway for 40 years has, with his book Winch and cable systems, filled the need for a comprehensive review of "steep technology". The task could not be in better hands. He has the practical experience, the pedagogic skill and the analytic rigour of a researcher and has, through work and travels in many countries, first-hand knowledge of the subject.
After an introductory historical review of cable technology, he gives a detailed account of the mechanics of winch and cables, including engineering formulae for estimating dimensions, forces, velocities, safety, etc. This is followed by descriptions of machine components and auxiliary equipment unique to winches and cables. The influence borne on choice of technology by site variables such as slope, tree and stand as well as estimates and measurements of forces under static and dynamic conditions are elaborated.
A large number of the two main systems - cable ways and cable cranes - in use throughout the world are described in detail with dimensions and with performance specifications and limitations. Quite rightly, cable cranes, which collect timber crosswise up to the cable line, occupy more than half of the book. These systems, which exist in many designs fitted to specific site conditions and to technical and biological requirements, have now reached a high degree of engineering sophistication and productivity and are likely to dominate in future. Excellent descriptions are given of the layout, rigging and road networks. Especially useful are the concluding chapters with comparisons of time consumption for rigging and logging production. The use of balloons, helicopters and hybrids of lighter-than-air crafts is also described in detail. The book contains many instructive drawings and pictures.
This impressive book by one of the most experienced experts fills a long-felt need for teaching at both professional and technical levels. It should be most useful for all those dealing with forest operations timber companies, manufacturers and consultants. It should be included in the luggage of all forest experts with assignments in developing countries, who almost always encounter problems related to steep terrain or soft and fragile ground.
Recherche et aménagement en milieu forestier tropical humide: 1er Projet - Taï de Côte-d'Ivoire. Jean-Louis Guillaumet, Guy Couturier & Henri Dosso, eds. Paris, Unesco. 1984. 245 pp. Price: FF 60.
This MAB Technical Note (no. 15) sums up the fruits of ten years' research and management in the Taï forest in southwest Côte d'Ivoire. The purpose of the research carried out at Taï was to determine guidelines for the management of forest ecosystems and to define a system whereby wood could be cut on a regular basis while protecting the forest's natural resources and wide potential. Like many humid and semi-humid tropical regions, the southwestern part of Côte d'Ivoire is being rapidly transformed by large-scale population movements; the transition from subsistence peasant agriculture to a market economy; large-scale land development; increasing conflicts between competing agricultural activities; and closer links with the world economy.
The research findings have been reported according to the different themes of the Taï project, particularly the physical environment; people and their activities, the cultivated field and its constraints; the structure and dynamism of vegetation; human health; national parks and protection of nature; and research results expressed in cartographical form. The last chapter provides a critical analysis of the project, including suggestions designed to give it a new impetus.
