A Geographical Information Approach for Forest Maintenance Operations with Emphasis on the Drainage Infrastructure and Culverts

Abstract

Forest operations engineering deals with all the essential infrastructure operations aiming at the efficient management of forested areas, which constitutes a prerequisite for the development of mountainous economies. Thus, the need for addressing this objective in an effective way, in conjunction with other issues associated with the protection and preservation of forest wealth, is of utmost importance. There are a whole range of forest operations for which a decision-making web-tool can potentially be utilized. This paper introduces an online decision-making tool for managing forest roads, which uses information derived from rainfall-runoff simulation. The proposed tool can be used to provide information about forest works maintenance and damage prevention in a forest environment. Furthermore, the tool assists in visualizing forest operations and achieves the optimization of their management. The development of the decision-making tool is also described, and a real case study (the Koupa watershed) is presented in detail to demonstrate its application and resulting advantages. The rainfall-runoff simulation was conducted for ten sub-basins in order to evaluate the efficiency of the corresponding culverts in the Koupa watershed.