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ŠUMARSKI LIST 9-10/2018 str. 51     <-- 51 -->        PDF

regulation in terms of selling, harvesting and transporting the timber (Abrudan et al. 2015) as well as the relative immaturity of the market actors (the whole timber harvesting sector have recently been privatized) is making the market factors assessment even more difficult, although interesting attempts have been made, mainly about local conditions (Nichiforel & Turcu 2015). Moreover, small and medium-sized harvesting companies owning and operating partially mechanized equipment (Moskalik et al. 2017) are predominating the Romanian wood harvesting market environment (Sbera 2007) a fact that often results in a low financial capability and in the lack of appropriate technology to harvest the wood (Rauch et al. 2015). This is even worse in the steep-terrain alpine and hilly forests that are often characterized by a low access which limits the use of state-of-art cable yarding technology (Borz et al. 2014a, Visser and Harrill 2017), resulting in a poor time management and low productivities (Borz et al. 2013), unsafe harvesting procedures (Borz et al. 2014b, Leshchinsky et al. 2016, Potočnik and Poje 2017) and altered practices in terms of winching distance (Borz et al. 2014c) that generate increased work-related risks (Đuka et al. 2016) and production costs and sometimes affect the environment (Borz et al. 2015, Cosola et al. 2016). Small scale companies often lack the financial capability to purchase expensive mechanized equipment (Spinelli et al. 2012) and the ability to associate themselves for such attempts given the fact that they are competitors on the wood market. Also, the internal cost-control processes and mechanisms of the Romanian contractors are rather absent in the available literature, therefore difficult to understand and manage. While the environmental, cultural and social dimensions affect the sustainability of the wood procurement (Rauch 2013), and the type of mechanization degree of harvesting systems depends on economic condition (Moskalik et al. 2017), forest types, wood species, management methods, terrain and climatic conditions (Vusić et al. 2013) one of the important issues in the optimization of forest operations is the cost control (Mathews 1942, Oprea & Borz 2008) and economic sustainability (Rauch 2013). It refers not only to the operational costs but to the harvesting contract rates (Spinelli et al. 2015) and the general context between suppliers and contractors. Obviously, the Romanian harvesting conditions differ compared to those from other Western European or international countries with the main differences resting in the equipment (Moskalik et al. 2017, Sbera 2007) and practices used (Moskalik et al. 2017, Borz 2015), market context (Nichiforel & Turcu 2015) and the low access due to the poorly-developed transportation infrastructure (Iordache et al. 2012). The underdeveloped transportation infrastructure generates low access to wood resources by increased extraction distances that are just one of the well-known factors affecting the operational costs irrespective of the harvesting system used (Heinimann 1998). On the other hand, applied research should provide knowledge and tools to help and support the competitiveness of the industry (Brown et al. 2011) triggering this way innovation. This is particularly important in the forest-based industry where the innovation runs slow but in order to do that the industry’s context should be known with the later referring both to the economic and technical environment. Often, a context is known by reliable statistics on the issues mentioned above and such statistics are usually gained by surveys.
The goal of this study was to analyze the harvesting conditions in relation to the wood selling prices for an area considered as being representative for the Romanian forest conditions. The working hypothesis of this study is that the variability of selling price of the timber could be explained by the variability of a set of technical factors characterizing the harvesting conditions. Therefore, the objectives of this study were set to: (1) developing descriptive statistics for harvesting conditions and timber selling prices, (2) attempting to model the wood selling prices as a function of operational harvesting conditions and (3) analyzing in detail the wood selling prices for the area taken into study.
2. Material and methods
Materijal i metode
A survey has been conducted on the harvesting contracts with the data used in this study sourced by the Regional Forest Administration of Baia Mare (RFA Baia Mare), Maramureş (Fig. 1), accounting for 13 forest districts falling under its administration and for three management years (2012-2014). The authors believe that the data used in this study can be seen as being representative for the Romanian conditions for several reasons including the wide variability of the forests, tree species and harvesting conditions in the area (starting with the plain and ending with alpine forests) and the standard contracting procedures at national level.