Over the past three decades, sets of timber harvesting guidelines designed to mitigate the deleterious environmental impacts of tree felling, yarding, and hauling have become known as "reduced-impact logging" techniques.
RIL or ‘‘reduced-impact logging’’ can be defined as intensively planned and carefully controlled timber harvesting conducted by trained workers in ways that minimize the deleterious impacts of logging.
It is a collective term that refers to the use of scientific and engineering principles, in combination with education and training, to improve the application of labor, equipment and operating methods in the harvesting of industrial timber.
Its main objective is to reduce soil disturbance, impacts on wildlife and damage to residual trees.
Methods are usually described for the construction of bridges, culverts, and other water course-related structures. Preharvest stand mapping always includes marking of trees to be felled and skid trail planning, whereas the mapping and marking of future crop trees (FCTs) and pre-harvest liana cutting are less consistently included in packages of RIL practices.
Central to all RIL guidelines is the use of felling techniques that increase worker safety, reduce wood waste, and direct the fall of trees to facilitate extraction and protect FCTs.
RIL techniques must also be economically attractive to concessionaires and desirably direct costs of logging operations should be significantly reduced compared with conventional techniques.
Reduced-impact logging
