THE ROLE OF FORESTRY GEOTECHNICS IN B.C. FORESTRY PRACTICE

The role of the geotechnical engineer in forest practice varies from consideration of clearcut/gully slope stability to forest road development and deactivation. Considerable expertise has been developed in avoiding terrain stability problems through increasingly high quality terrain mapping and advances in terrain attribute studies. Continued efforts are underway to tackle issues such as landslide runout prediction combining the expertise of geoscientists and geotechnical engineers. Forestry geotechnics, with the advent of a results-based approach has a key role to play in forest road engineering. This extends throughout the life of the forest road from route selection into layout and design, construction and maintenance and finally road deactivation. Development of practical quantitative risk assessment methods is seen as a priority area. This paper using case studies shows the positive impacts of forestry geotechnics in the BC forestry industry.

The future challenges facing forestry geotechnical engineers are highlighted including, the integration of terrain attribute studies with geotechnics, better empirical design techniques for forest roads, continued development of appropriate stability analysis models and an improved focus in data acquisition techniques to address existing “geotechnical knowledge gaps”. If the forest industry is to react to a results-based shift, with an emphasis on impacts to resources, then there is a real need for a strong inter-disciplinary practice. The combined skill sets of the forest and geotechnical engineers should, for example, be readily available at all stages in the design life of a forest road. Finally the education of both geoscientists and engineers must react to the changing inter-disciplinary nature of the forest sector by providing the necessary theoretical and practical skill sets.