Treesearch

Public concern over the adverse visual impact of clearcutting has heightened interest in developing and testing alternative regeneration practices for central Appalachian hardwoods.

Forest management degree programs prepare students for careers in forestry by teaching a combination of biological sciences (e.g., silvics and genetics) and business management (e.g., forest policy and timber valuation). During a 4-year degree program, students learn the impact of interest rates, equipment costs, and environmental policies on forest management and silvicultural decisions. However, little consideration is given to worker safety and health and its impact on forest management. This paper illustrates the ethical and economic importance of logging safety to forest managers and...

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has established safety and health regulations for the logging industry. These new regulations move beyond the prior OSHA pulpwood harvesting standard by including sawtimber harvesting operations. Because logging is a major tool used by forest managers to meet silvicultural goals, managers must be aware of what the OSHA standard would mean to them. Many aspects of the new standard pertain to the training of logging employees, safe equipment operation, and safe harvesting techniques, but there are sections of the OSHA standard that...

Ameliorating the visual and environmental impact associated with harvesting hardwoods on steep slopes will require the efficient use of skyline yarding along with silvicultural alternatives to clearcutting. In evaluating the effects of these alternatives on harvesting revenue, results of field studies and computer simulations were used to estimate costs and revenue for skyline yarding operations. The methods evaluated include group selection and three treatments each for conventional shelterwood, thinning, diameter limit, and irregular shelterwood to initiate two-age management. Harvesting...

An expert system, FOREX, was developed to access the data from the database management provided by MANAGE. For a specific site index, the user of FOREX can obtain information on present net worth, optimal thinning entry timing, optimal stand rotation age, diameter at breast height, volume by grade and value of the trees harvested, and based on the cable yarder used, the average slope yarding distance, truck class, road class, log-bucking methods, and the number of thinnings desired. This paper describes FOREX, which is valuable to forest managers, planners, loggers, and landowners,...

This small study examined the frequency of knots (> 1 growth ring), pin knots (latent or suppressed buds), and pin knot clusters in 414 black walnut (Juglans nigra L.) lumber from 42 logs. 18 to 21 cm dbh, cut from a 14-year-old provenance/progeny test. Two boards from opposite sides of each log were analyzed for number of knots, pin knots, and pin knot clusters. The boards averaged 1.4 knots per linear meter across all sources with no differences among logs within a source or between the apical and basal halves. From 50 to 56% of the pin knots occurred as 2, 3, or 4 pin knots clustered...

The Central and Appalachian hardwood regions contain a diverse and valuable timber resource. The regions are important to the hardwood industry because they contain 68 percent of the eastern hardwood sawtimber. Furthermore, more than 70 percent of the hardwood lumber produced in the United States is manufactured at mills located in 16 of the states in the regions. This paper examines the hardwood sawmill industry and its relationship to the hardwood resource in the Central and Appalachian Regions. The major conclusion is that there is considerable regional variation in the size and...

Production and autumn predation of northern red oak acorns was measured over four years in five Pennsylvania stands dominated by this species. Mean annual production was 41,779/acre, of which an average of 7.9% was destroyed by insects or decay following insect attack, and an average of 38.6% was destroyed or removed by vertebrates. White-tailed deer appeared to be the dominant vertebrate consumer of acorns.

The effects of four planting depths (0, 3, 7, 11 cm) and acorn size on the percentage seedling emergence of red, pin, and black oak were determined. In a complimentary study, the effects of five water potential treatments (0, -.2, -.4, -.6, -1.0 MPa) on the percentage germination of red, pin, and black oak acorns were measured.

This study compares the use of plastic films to conventional methods for establishing hardwoods on a recently cultivated old field site using 1-year-old micropropagated plantlets of white ash (Fraxinus americana L.) and silver maple (Acer saccharinum L.). After one growing season in the field, height of plantlets with all weed control treatments exceeded the height of the plantlets in the non-weeded control. After two growing seasons, plantlets of both species established with plastic films were taller than plantlets with conventional methods of weed control or in the non-weeded plots. No...