Abstract

Effective timber extraction from primary managed forests requires accurate estimates of the annual volumes of wood. Unlike other studies, this paper uses dummy variables to capture the effects of atypical observations and to estimate the volumetric equations using nonlinear least squares. The results show that the artificial variables are important for the model’s specification, and that the use of nonlinear least squares estimates provides more robust results for timber volumes than those generated by the ordinary least squares method. This methodology can be adopted to estimate the volume of wood in the primary Amazon forests that are selected for forest concessions.

Key words: Forest management, volume equation, timber company.