Abstract:
Indonesia has the largest mangrove areas in the world and mostly been managed for conservation and natural parks, or protected and restricted areas purposes. Utilization of mangrove for forest concession for wood production is exceptional prohibited or strictly permitted. Nowadays, there are only two mangrove areas designed for wood production, mainly located in West Kalimantan and West Papua, respectively. In Papua, the mangrove forest concession is located in Bintuni Bay. At this area, mangrove forest is managed and harvested for producing wood chip, as main raw material for paper industries (pulp and paper material). This mangrove forest operation practices have been in operating since 1988, or more than 25 years.
Mangrove ecosystem and habitat are very unique, therefore, the technique, equipment, and infrastructure used to harvest mangrove are also different to those from terrestrial forest (non mangrove forest). This paper highlights the silviculture system for mangrove wood production, and forest operation method used for felling, bucking, skidding, transporting, and converting the mangrove wood to wood chips. Field survey, industrial plant visitation were used to collect the data and information needed. The research was taken placed mainly at Amutu Island, and its surrounding areas, Bintuni bay, West Papua.
The results indicated that five mangrove species are harvested, but two mangrove species are artificially re-planted prior for next cutting cycles of 30 years. Mangrove exploitation consists of several steps, from forest inventory, seed trees mapping, green belt marking, mapping the wood stacking, and detailed plans for camps of the workers, skidding maps etc. Initially, selected mangrove trees are felt using hand chain saw, bucking them into 2 m long, and debarked manually. Then, the debarked logs are transported manually into wood stacking prior to be transported for wood chip production. Heavy equipment usually operated for forest extraction at terrestrial forests, like skidding tractor, logging trucks, timber jack, are out of usages. Therefore, the damages of remained standing forest, seedling, or even soil can be minimized or even limited. Different to that of terrestrial forests, which are heavily depending on heavy machines, forest operations employed in mangrove are mostly done manually by forest workers. As a result, this semi manual technique of forest exploitation result in less damages on the standing forest remain, and could support the principles of reduced impact logging (RIL).
