This section will include objectives, scope, depth, general context, general definitions, as well as some explanation/justification for the structure and approach of the book.

The objective of the book is to describe and explain the current state of knowledge concerning the management of industrial forest operations.

The forest operations described in the text will include all of those that can be seen in industrial forestry in a sustainable forest management context, as well as the main factors that affect those operations: forest management regimes, markets, policies and regulations. These operations would include road construction and maintenance, harvesting, product transport, stand re-establishment and tending, as well as major support and administrative functions.

In general, the intent is to go into these subjects into the depth required for a thorough understanding of industrial forest operations management. However, where ancillary subjects (such as human resource management or forest management, for example) are well covered in other business, forestry or science textbooks, they will not be covered in depth in this book.

The general context will be industrial forest operations under sustainable forest management.

The definitions included in this introduction will be those that are prerequisites for understanding the sections below, but are not specific to any one section. Note to editors: couldn’t this come from an existing document? Do any of you have a set of definitions that can be adapted for this?

While this textbook will be aimed at supporting a course in forest operations management, it is intended that the structure of this book will be such that parts of it can be used for teaching material in courses where the main emphasis is not on FOM (eg. Courses on forest management, forest roads, environmental management).

It is intended that this book will be available on-line (to take advantage of multi-media and other on-line sources of reference materials) as well as in a publish-on-demand format.