Forest operations engineering and management – the ways behind and ahead of a scientific discipline

Nacrtak The forest operations engineering and management community has been facing the problem of improving its scientific visibility, realigning its research efforts to the future challenges, and of strengthening its self-confidence. The paper aims at exploring the paradigms that shaped the development of forest operations as a scientific discipline, sketching a vision how forest operations could look like in 2020, establishing a common understanding for future of the discipline, and discussing the major challenges ahead. The investigation identified five periods of steady state development (paradigms) and developed a vision of network-based forest operations systems, built of »self-organizing« cells. It then discusses the challenges that we will probably been faced with in the fields of »harvesting and transportation engineering«, »forest operationsmanagement«, »forest ergonomics«, and »forest operations ecology«. The study intended to trigger a broad discussion on the future directions of forest operations engineering and management, and to build a basis for a redesign of corresponding curricula in higher education.