Determination of standard unit costs of selected works from the silviculture

The article presents the standardization of costs of silviculture treatments (reforestation and afforestation, corrections and overplanting, forest tending) with the method of grouping forest districts with similar natural conditions and the ‘technological’ method. The standard costs were compared with the real costs, and the applied methods were assessed in terms of their suitability for the State Forests financial system. Source materials were obtained for 2017 from the databases of the State Forests Information System. The base for determination of the value of the average monthly gross remuneration by poviats for forest districts and regional directorates of the State Forests for 2017 was information obtained from the Local Data Bank of the Statistics Poland and announcements of the President of the Statistics Poland on average remuneration in the national economy. The standardization method of unit costs in silviculture based on groups of forest districts with similar natural conditions boiled down to determining 12 uniform groups of forest districts in terms of the structure of forest habitat types. The ‘technological’ method consisted in building technological models of works in silviculture using the labor−consumption catalogues in force in the State Forests. The relationship between the developed standard costs and the weighted average real costs was calculated using the Spearman correlation. It achieved lower values for all analyzed treatment groups compared to the dependencies related to cost standardization using the ‘technological’ method. Comparison of deviations of reforestation and afforestation as well as corrections and overplanting calculated by two methods with real costs determined in regional directorates of the State Forests using the Wilcoxon test allowed to indicate regional directorates, in which underestimation of standard costs concerned both analyzed methods occurred. Forest districts included in these directorates should be subjected to careful analysis. To standardize unit costs of reforestation and afforestation, as well as corrections and overplanting, it is proposed to use the method of determining standard unit costs on the basis of groups of forest districts with similar natural conditions. The ‘technological’ method should be used to standardize unit costs of forest tending. However, one should take into account the overestimation of standard costs in comparison with the actual unit costs of this group of activities, especially in forest districts with high competition on the forest services market