Citation
Ismail, Mohd Hasmadi and Jusoff, Kamaruzaman and J., Muhamad Azizon
(2008)
Forest Road Assessment in Ulu Muda Forest Reserve, Kedah, Malaysia.
Modern Applied Science, 2 (4).
pp. 100-107.
ISSN 1913-1844
Abstract
For the last few decades, forest road construction for forest harvesting in the tropical forest has been shown to cause
considerable damage to the soil physical properties, forest environment and watershed areas. These effects can be
minimized through implementation of proper harvesting procedure in the use of harvesting machines and forest road
specification guideline. Forest road specification is important as technical guideline that must be comply by any loggers
in order to construct forest roads. The road constructions that meet the outlined specification were potential to
minimize the damage of forest roads and increase the efficiency in forest product output, while reducing harvesting cost.
The purpose of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of feeder road construction in compliance to the Forest Road
Specifications 1999 as outlined by the Forest Department of Peninsular Malaysia. Systematic samplings were
conducted along 14.5 km of feeder road where an observation and measurements has been taken at every 500 m points
visited. A total of 30 samples were taken which incorporate dimensions of road specification elements for each point
such as road cross section, vertical alignment, horizontal alignment, road failure and earth work. The comparison data
was collected to determine whether the failure is due or not to the specification. Result presented that the total length of
the road failure in the study area was 551.4 m or 3.8% out of 14.5 km. The types of the road failure were classified into
five categories that were surface failure, surface run-off, wheel track, drainage failure and landslide. The major failure
occurred on the feeder roads was surface failure, which represent about 38.2%. Reasons of non-compliance are
ascertained and several recommendations were given to reduce the damage of feeder road.
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