Helle Ross Gobakken is currently working on her PhD on the topic “Forest Road attributes and network demands characterized by changing climatic conditions and silvicultural regimes in Norway”.
Forest accessibility through a suitable road network and the ability to traffic stand areas with forest machines during operational phases are fundamental prerequisites for forest management. However, the existing forest road network varies in quality and maintenance status, thus limiting its function.
In her PhD, Helle is working on developing, applying, and validating methods and technologies to improve the efficiency of forest road management in Norway under the consideration of a competitive and transitioning timber sector, increased societal environmental awareness and climate change-induced extreme weather.
So far, she has collected georeferenced geometry data from forest roads using the mobile proximal sensing platform RoadSens.
She is now in the process of analyzing and evaluating the efficiency of these data in classifying the forest roads according to the national technical standards.