Abstract

The XI Region of Chile has characteristics that make forest development difficult. These include an abundant area of the native forest but with low saw-log yields and deficient road infrastructure. The main roads have a low-quality standard and most of the secondary roads do not exist yet. With a high investment for accessing the forest, together with a low yield of quality logs creates a high-risk business with low profit. The main objective of this work was to search for practical tools and alternatives that allow the owner to satisfies his harvest requirements in the medium-term under environmental restrictions by answering when, where, how, and how much can be harvested. The multi-criteria analysis was used in the first stage to find the key variables, which will guide management objectives. In a second stage, the software Network2000 was used to build and solve a network-transportation problem when the absence of road infrastructure can result in an infeasible project, because of economical restrictions. The main results include the definition of some key environmental variables and their spatial distribution and a GIS database of the forest to facilitate the planning process as a decision support system. On the operational side, an analysis of the potential roads, the connection of the harvest units to a sawmill, with variable cost, fixed cost, total cost, and volume per section of road and harvest unit is presented as a solution. The timing of the different investments and the total profit of the scenarios is also present.