Openness of forests and forest land in the Bosnia and Herzegovina entity Republic of Srpska

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the description of the openness of primary forest traffic infrastructure in the Republic of Srpska. The data were collected using Garmin Oregon 600 GPS devices across the entire territory of state forests, managed by the Public Enterprise, Sume Republike Srpske", and the recorded traces were compared and corrected by orthophoto snapshots with a 0.50 m resolution. The tools used for the processing of collected data were software ESRI ArcGIS 10.2 and Quantum GIS 16.2. In addition, the analysis covers all forest roads that pass through state forests that can be used for forest management and enable the movement of trucks. Public roads are only taken as an overview of openness of this category of roads and forest openness is shown by forest categories. The analyses included 843,466.00 ha out of the total of 1,002,056.00 ha of state-owned forests. The final aim of this analysis was to obtain a clear insight into the quantitative status of primary forest traffic infrastructure in the Republic of Srpska. The data were collected during 2016. Based on the analysis, the total density of the network of primary forest traffic infrastructure for the research area was 9.28 m/ha without public roads, i.e. 11.21 m/ha with public roads. In addition, density of the network of primary forest traffic infrastructure was determined separately for each category of forests, and the highest density of forest road network was found in forest plantations (11.57 m/ha or 14.82 m/ha with public roads) and high forests with natural regeneration (11.13 m/ha or 12.49 m/ha with public roads).