Roads, landings, and skid trails
Anna B Stockstad: Hi, everyone! I'm Anna Stockstad from University of Minnesota Extension
Dave Nolle - MN Logger Ed Program: one day, and only from the minutes of the longer education program.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): We're back again here with still your share from you, Pm. Blandon, and today we'll be talking about roads, landing, and skid trails. Thanks so much for joining us again, Soyer.
Anna B Stockstad: So in the last episode you talked to us about harvest planning, and that gave us a really good foundation for today's episode and future episodes as well.
Anna B Stockstad: So, as you're planning a harvest, how do you choose where to place infrastructure on a site? So let's say landings specifically. And how do you determine how many landings to have on a site.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): Yeah, this is a great topic. And when we're talking about implementing the guidelines or really minimizing impacts on a harvest site.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): Deciding how we lay out the infrastructure is, is a really key aspect of that this these skid trails and landings and and roads, for that matter. This is where we have the highest level of impact. So it's really important.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): I like to just break it down really, simply. And you know the overall intent is to minimize these things on site and minimize overall footprint of of all the infrastructure. And so it's really a balance of trying to find
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): how we can minimize that infrastructure, but also allow for an efficient removal of you know, the timber material and implement the silver cultural prescription. But there's some really basic rules of thumb like
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): we want to avoid sensitive sites, places with soft soils, wetlands, filter strips anywhere that's near a known cultural resource or rare plant species Anything like that. I mean it just doesn't make sense to have
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): landings and and skid trails, or forward, or routes near those things.
From there we can start thinking about. Maybe there's like existing old landings. Or maybe
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): you know, these old wildlife openings we often hear them described as in, and oftentimes those can make good places as long as they're not in one of those sensitive sites.
You know that that status as a sensitive site, kind of kind of trumps all, and in in my mind at least. But otherwise we're just trying to minimize those things, and it really comes to be a balancing, active.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): having the least amount of landings we can, but also not causing unnecessary
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): skidding to occur. You know we don't want to have folks getting a mile because we're just gonna have more skidding damage then. So it's it's really a a balance, and it comes down to the site specifics and and really the
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): the operator and the equipment that they have. You know we we tend to have operations. Now, you know, for instance, if we have a cut to length operation, we might not need a landing at all, and in which case that's great. But it doesn't work for everybody. And so we need to balance those decisions.
Dave Nolle - MN Logger Ed Program: So you you kind of triggered a bit of a chicken, or the a kind of question for me here. So you kinda You look at it. You attack your your sale and say, okay, this is where we think our landings are going to go.
Dave Nolle - MN Logger Ed Program: What but really, which is it? The chicken or the egg of the of the landings, or how many skid trails? And how far are you skating? And and how do those 2 pieces fit together?
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): Yeah, it's it's absolutely chicken or the egg, and depending on the site.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): you know, one might get emphasized more than the other. And again, this is gonna come down to some of the specifics of the site. Is it, or do we have sensitive soils? Do we have a steep topography in places or wetlands to avoid?
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): And also again the equipment that's being used, You know we we we might approach a timber harvest site very differently, depending on if it's a full tree skid versus a cut to length, and that's fine. But we need to take that into account. And in the design
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): it really you have to be thinking about both at the same time, and also thinking about where your roads are. So it needs to be kind of an integrated approach to balance those things. And and there's often not one perfect solution. But yeah, you know, there's often a few different ways. You could could approach something on a particular site.
Anna B Stockstad: And so in terms of skid trails in the guidelines, it tells us that Skid trail should be less than 15% of the total harvest area. But how do you account for that during planning?
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): Yeah. Well, and again, this is important because all of those those places are
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): potential impacts to site, long term
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): skid trails, landings. That's where we see highest levels of potential or risk for erosion and compaction, and
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): and that can impact things like regeneration or even the ability to to get vegetative cover back on the site.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): So it is really really important. We don't want to limit future productivity by taking portions of the stand out of production unnecessarily.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): It can be difficult. But in general we've seen that if we implement these sort of rules of thumb.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): you know, using goods, discipline, skid patterning, using well located landings, using well designed road networks that it's pretty easy to keep these things under 15%. And at Blandon we've actually tracked this, using aerial surveys
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): for a number of years, I mean, probably since the guidelines were first established, and
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): and we found it's really not difficult at all. But it's intentional. You know. We have to be intentional about implementing the guidelines and communicating with the operators that this is important.
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): So it is really important, and and you can easily track it and see those impacts later. But we found implementing these these really simple common sense Guidelines is is pretty pretty simple.
Dave Nolle - MN Logger Ed Program: great, so you know, to build on my question from before. There we have the chicken, the egg, and almost the barn yard now, so that we're we're laying it out to make sure that that everything's going to be a a working system to minimize erosion compaction, be aware of running and implement our plan, because now it's actually
Dave Nolle - MN Logger Ed Program: time. We we spent the time on the plan. Now we're in the in the field doing all of our our roads and landings, and skidding, and in the in the right way to be the most efficient into
Dave Nolle - MN Logger Ed Program: to live within the the the guidelines, to to
Sawyer Scherer (he/him): properly take care of the landscape. Yeah.
Anna B Stockstad: And I really liked your point about how roads, landings, and sket trails are where we have the most impact on the landscape of the site, you know, especially on the soils. And so I think that's really important to consider.
Anna B Stockstad: And so I think again, you've given us a really good foundation and a lot of good information today about how to implement roads, landings, and skid trails during the planning process.
Anna B Stockstad: So just thank you so much for joining us today. That's all the time we have.
Anna B Stockstad: And again to our listeners. Keep listening. Our next episode will be focused on water, diversion and erosion control, and we'll see you in the next one. Thank you so much for listening.
