Cost Relationships for Evaluating Major Timber Management Opportunities in the Lake States

Cost relationships have been developed for eight major timber management opportunities in Wisconsin and adjacent areas. They can be used to estimate costs for nearly 20 different forestry practices. Classes of work range from aerial operations, through two different types of caterpillar-tractor machine operations, to several kinds of hand work such as pruning and hand-planting. These relationships link the physical costs (primarily labor and equipment-time requirements) of the processes to primary cost determinants such as the size and type of ground vegetation, or the Ribes density in the case of blister rust control. They were developed by regression analysis using data obtained from accounting and other records of several major public and private forest management agencies. Dollar-costs can be estimated from the physical cost relationships.