Operational harvest planning in the southern USA has not been widely used in the past due to a lack of state legislation, non-regulatory water quality protection programs, and relatively easy logging conditions. Increased government regulation and market pressures to document sustainable forest management under various certification standards is increasing the need for harvest planning in the region, particularly on private, non-industrial timber sales. We developed an ArcView extension, Setting Analyst (SA), to assist harvest planners. SA can use spatial information obtained from scanned air photos or detailed data from a geographic information system. It models travel patterns of ground-based machines and compares different harvest settings based on projected average skidding distance, costs of skidding and improvements, and site disturbance levels. In its current form, it does not account for slope. SA can model settings with complex features such as stream crossings, restricted areas, and skidding on designated trails. Travel intensity is assessed since it is highly correlated with site disturbance and soil compaction. To assess the utility of SA, we used it to model ten actual harvesting settings and contrasted each with two proposed settings. SA produced sale plans that were very similar to those observed on the ground. Its primary advantage is that it conveniently documents each alternative setting considered for the timber sale. These can be kept on file to demonstrate the level of planning used when forest certification audits are conducted. SA offers the most potential to harvest planners that already use GIS or GPS but desire additional analysis and documentation capabilities.
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