RESUME

Forestry Education in the Czech Republic

Professional forestry education in the CR is offered at three levels - apprentice schools, full secondary schools, and academic colleges. All types of schools cover a wide extent of knowledge. This includes namely ecological aspect of landscape management, nature sciences, technology, and economics as well as comprehensive subjects. Such broad tether gives a concrete advantage - a quick orientation in many disciplines, an easy conformability, and through this nearly zero unemployment of school leavers (source: employment bureaus). However such scope is considerably costly.

Vocational schools

There are 13 forestry vocational apprentice schools and 1 integrated apprentice school.

The surveys say an adequate number of skilled workers for forestry operations still cannot be achieved. Forestry apprentice schools report high costs of training apprentices. In spite of that the scale of offered training programmes will have to be extended to cover efficient forestry machinery.

Secondary forestry schools

There are 5 schools providing full secondary forestry education in the CZ. They altogether have a long tradition and a very good professional standard. They answer the demand of forestry practice by their professional orientation. However from the view of the state company “Lesy ČR” there is a redundancy of secondary schools leavers and college graduates. The trend of rationalising the number of forestry professionals as is manifested in German and Austrian forestry management and leading to constraining the number of new pupils is supposed to affect also our forestry education.

High vocational forestry schools

There represent a new grade of forestry education. They admit leavers of other full secondary schools and in a 2-year or a 3- year period teach them for a qualified exercise of demanding professional activities. This degree of education has not been required do far - only practice will obviously show which positions and activities are these leavers suitable for and demanded.

Forestry colleges

The academic forestry education is provided by 2 colleges within two universities of agriculture. Apart from a master degree in forestry (“forest engineering”) they offer also related disciplines: landscape engineering and wood processing engineering, and a bachelor programme “Economic and administrative service in forestry”. Based on a survey an annual demand for 115 graduates was determined. This number has been exceeded and may achieve about 210 persons in 2001. The situation with employment of forestry graduates is also skewed by a difficult allocation of landscape engineers who compete also for forestry positions. Therefore there is a surplus of forestry professionals with academic education what also affects the allocation of secondary forestry schools leavers as the graduates push into low operational positions, too.

Application of waterways for wood transportation
Oldřich Lesňák (pp. 158 - 159)

Wood has been transported by waterways since time immemorial. Wood floating has been the only unrivalled transport since medieval ages till the 21st century not only in Czech lands but also in a world measure.

Today wood is hauled mainly on railways or roads in Czechia. Wood shipping is sporadic though there are 303 km of well- maintained Labe-Vltava waterways available. Without any other investment this waterway can be used for transporting wood, whole stems, chips, saw wood, as well as wood wastes. Today only soft pulp wood is shipped from Germany to paper factory at Štětí.

Labe-Vltava waterway links steplessly to the European waterway network on which the mentioned assortments are commonly transported to huge harbours of Hamburg, Lübek, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In advanced European countries the waterway wood transport is on a high level of development thanks to connection of inland and marine transport. Major European waterways go through the whole continent namely thanks to major rivers of Danube, Rhein, and Volga. Millions of tons of wood are shipped in bulk or containers.

The present trend in world transport is represented by a combined (broken) transport using two or more means of transport depending from their effectiveness for the region respective serviceability and economic effect, like automobiles - ships.