Establishment of man-made forest management system for energy-use by using Landsat/TM imagery

The Japanese forestry industry has been significantly affected by the increase in low-price timber imports and a diminishing work force. This has had a direct impact on the level of maintenance of the coniferous forests. In this paper, we examine the development of local domestic energy supply schemes in conjunction with effective forest maintenance plans based on data from Landsat/TM imagery. We examined regions in which coniferous forests experienced various levels of blight and to investigated the introduction of energy supply systems using such forests. Both sound and blighted coniferous forests were examined and the characteristics of each area quantified. The supply of energy to a small town using a local blighted coniferous forest was examined. It is estimated that the use of existing wood burning technologies and an effective forest maintenance plan would result in the supply of power to 30% of the households in the town.