A Multicriteria Evaluation Approach to Forest Road Network Planning

Forest roads can potentially cause environmental impacts, especially related to water dynamics and sediment production. To identify critical areas for forest road allocation, we considered landscape criteria such as slope, erodibility (K), distance to accumulated water flow, and aspect. The multicriteria evaluation method combines these criteria and produces a spatial map of critical areas for road allocation in a planted forest farm. The Receiver Operating Characteristic analysis supported the verification of map accuracy. The map indicated that around 40% of the farm had a high criticality level, and 30% had an average level. The current roads were associated with different levels of criticality: 37.79% were considered high, 21.78% were average, 17.43% were low, 15.23% were very high, 6.97% were very low, 0.43% were extremely low, and 0.36% were extremely high. The accuracy of the map was statistically significant, suggesting an appropriate representative of the landscape aspects. Therefore, we concluded that using the MCE method to aggregate criteria supports forest road network planning by incorporating landscape characteristics