Predicting and Projecting Soil Disturbance Risk Caused by Forest Logging and Transport Operations as a Base for Spatio-temporal Planning of Forest Management under Climate Change

Each case of human interference in forest environment, especially harvesting timber crops, is associated with disturbances in forest ecosystems (Sowa and Kulak, 2008). These disturbances may be described in many different ways but their best qualitative impression may be obtained by estimating their size and the chance of their occurrence. The size of disturbances in forest environment caused by timber harvesting, as well as factors affecting their value, are relatively well recognized (Unver and Acar, 2009). However, the knowledge concerning the probability of occurrence of disturbances is fragmentary
Our main objective, then, is to evaluate and comparison the applicability of statistical models to infer the driving forces of logging impacts. We do so by creating univariate model response curves that describe the relationship between predictors and harvesting impacts susceptibility as the best model outcome.