This year marks the 52th edition of the symposium ‘Forestry Mechanization’ or FORMEC as it is more commonly know which was held together with the 42th edition of the Council on Forest Engineering (COFE) in Sopron, Hungary from October 6th to 9th.

Impression from the FORMEC 2019 plenum ((c) J. L. Rodrigues/RTDS)

This year TECH4EFFECT had its’ own session which was held on Monday October 7th. It included following presentations:

• “Productivity and fuel consumption of heavy forwarders under different configurations: benchmarks from fleet-level long-term records (one million loads)” by Raffaele Spinelli and Angelo Conrado de Arruda Moura.
• “Productivity and Environmental Impacts of Cable-assisted Logging – A case study in southern Oregon, USA” by  Woodam Chung, Brett Morrissette, Preston Gren, Ben Leshchinsky, Kevin Bladon, Jeff Hatten and John Sessions.
• “A micro-catchment approach to measuring surface run-off after cable logging” by Bruce Talbot, Omar Mologni, Nicholas Clarke, Marek Pierzchala and Rasmus Astrup.
• “Assessing Cable Tensile Forces of Winch-Assisted Forwarders on Steep Terrain under Real Working Conditions” by Thomas Holzfeind, Christian Kanzian, Karl Stampfer and Franz Holzleitner.
• “Factors Affecting Productivity and Utilisation of Winch-Assist Machines: Six Case Studies in New Zealand and Canada” by Cameron Leslie, Colin Koszman, James Hunt, Rien Visser, Hunter Harrill and Dominik Roeser.
• “Flat and wet: Cable yarding on sensitive soils in Europe – motivations, challenges and potential” by Gernot Erber, Raffaele Spinelli, Giovanna Ottaviani Aalmo, Dirk Jaeger, Marian Schönauer, Stephan Hoffmann, Bruce Talbot and Karl Stampfer.

FORMEC 2019 presentation by G. Erber et al. ((c) J. L. Rodrigues (RTDS).

On Tuesday October 8th our coordinator Rasmus Astrup/NIBIO held a keynote on the “Digitalization of Forest Harvesting: The potential for improved environmental and production efficiency”.

Rasmus Astrup/NIBIO held a keynote at FORMEC 2019 ((c) C. Kanzian.

Several posters on TECH4EFFECT were also presented on:

• “Smart sensing technology for predicting forest road’s bearing capacity by Franz Holzleitner et al.
• “Indicator based assessment of trafficability of forest roads” by Marian Schönauer et al.
• “Coppice after 3 different cutting systems: growth capacity and mortality” by Carolina Lombardini et al.

See the posters in this e-poster presentation!

It could not have been any better for TECH4EFFECT this year as 3 prizes were awarded to the consortium! What a great achievement – congratulations to

• Markus Konrad (second person from the left) received an operator award by COFE,
• Thomas Holzfeind received a student communication award and
• Marian Schönauer received a poster award.

TECH4EFFECT won 3 prizes for presentations and at FORMEC 2019 ((c) C. Kanzian) – from left to right: Rasmus Astrup, Markus Konrad, Thomas Holzfeind and Marian Schönauer.

To get more information you can read up here on the full program of FORMEC 2019 and on the conference website you can access the conference proceeding abstracts.