WV LOGGERS COUNCIL NEWS 26 West Virginia Forestry Association Mountain State Forestry | Spring 24 www.wvfa.org Forestry operations play a crucial role in managing our natural resources. One critical aspect is understanding the time it takes to harvest timber. With a good estimate of harvesting time, both resource managers, landowners, and regulators improve their planning processes, work toward minimizing environmental and wildlife impacts, and improve overall sustainability. In this project, we investigated the duration of timber harvesting operations in West Virginia (WV), explore some of the factors that might influence it, and discuss the implications and opportunities. To start, data from the WV Division of Forestry’s Logging Operation Notification, Inspection, and Enforcement (LONIE) system were used to help develop this time estimate. Over a period of ten years (from January 1, 2013, to March 24, 2023), LONIE data covering 20,000 harvesting operations covering a combined area of 1.5 million acres in WV were analyzed. LONIE stores all the data associated with notification forms the WV Division of Forestry requires timber license holder to submit at the start of every logging operation. This notification includes basic contact information, size and location of operations, silviculture prescription, BMP compliance, and start and finish dates. To estimate the time required to harvest each unit, the overall harvesting duration was calculated by subtracting the provided start date from the end date. Almost all large data sets can have some messy entries that can have an impact on the analyses. To minimize these impacts, the data were cleaned to remove notifications from the analysis if they had extremely long durations (over three years), had a duration value of zero days, or had operations with exceptionally high productivity of over five acres per day. This process removed almost 400 operations, resulting in 19,682 operations used in the analysis. In most cases, the required time to harvest a large 200-acre tract will obviously be longer than the time required to harvest a How Long Does It Take to Harvest Timber in West Virginia? By Ben Spong, Forest Operations Specialist, WVU Appalachian Hardwood Center, WVU Extension Service Variable Average Acres/Day Region Region 1 0.48 Region 2 0.54 Region 3 0.55 Region 4 0.52 Region 5 0.65 Region 6 0.56 Silviculture Even Age 0.48 Uneven Age 0.54 Diameter Limit 0.55 Season Summer 0.57 Winter 0.53 Timber Owner Industry 0.62 Landowner 0.43
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