• Meek, Philippe
  FERIC: Forest Research Institute of Canada
  

FERIC studied two commercial thinning systems under comparable conditions. The first involved manual felling, processing, and piling, whereas the second was completely mechanized and used a small single-grip harvester. Two shortwood forwarders with different payload capacities were also studied in this operation. The costs at roadside depended strongly on the hourly wages for the workers. A sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the estimated production costs for the two systems were comparable (at $22.83/m^3) when the wages reached $19.22 per scheduled hour.