Timber Harvesting Residual Trees Damage Decision-Making for Sustainable Forest Management

Tropical timber forest has played an important role in the Malaysian economy for the last few decades. To manage and determine the acceptable cutting regime that suits the forest stand, environment, cutting cycle, site, and expected timber output is crucial in maintaining forest sustainability. At present, the majority of Malaysian forest concessions are practicing the Selective Management System (SMS) since 1978 which complies with Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) policies. Various studies discovered that in terms of economically, the timber market in Peninsular Malaysia was reduced due to incremental cost in operating SFM. Therefore, revision and adoption of a suitable harvesting method to increase the timber production conform to SFM are required. This study proposed a new method that consists of two calculation layers to determine the potential harvested trees. The first layer calculates the tree felling direction which yields minimum damage to residual trees. The second layer verifies whether each pre-determined tree to be harvested is feasible to be logged by comparing the minimal damage value and volume of residual trees to the volume and value of potential harvestable trees. The methodology chosen is the waterfall model. Meanwhile, the finding of this research; the analysis of the comparison provides a significant impact on the economical point of view.