Treesearch

Mine timbers are a basic need of West Virginia's giant coal industry. The annual requirement of sawed mine timbers is roughly 250 million board feet. The mines also use a large volume of wood in rough form for props and lagging. Yet, compared to sawlogs and veneer logs, these mine timbers are low-value products. This means that they must be produced at low cost.

A serious handicap in planning forestry programs in the Northeast is a lack of basic information about forest diseases and their impact on the forest. Magnitude of disease losses, the relative importance of various diseases, their locations, rates of spread, intensities, and the tree mortality they cause - information on all these factors is basic to the development of a sound forest-disease research program. And we do not have it.

Sweet birch (Betula lenta) is also known as black birch and cherry birch. It is commercially less important than the two principal members of the genus, yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) and paper birch (Betula papyrifera).

Past experience with cuttings in old-growth northern hardwoods has demonstrated that the primary regeneration problem is to obtain a large proportion of desirable species of good quality. Regardless of method or intensity of cutting, the total amount of reproduction usually is adequate. Second-growth stands are a different story: this report pertains only to old-growth.

When forest fires swept over southwestern Maine in 1947, some 130,000 acres of forest land were burned over. This was mostly white pine land--sites too poor to grow good hardwood stands. After the fire, white pine reproduction became established on 5,000 to 6,000 acres of this land. But by 1954 most of the young pine was suppressed or at least was in competition with hardwood sprout growth and brush species.

The continuing heavy demand for high-quality Allegheny hardwoods, particularly black cherry and sugar maple, impresses on us the need for more information responses of hardwoods to pruning. Pruning may have beneficial effects: it may increase quality without sacrificing growth. Or it may have detrimental effects: it may cause dieback of cambium, decay, staining and discoloration, gum formation, or other pathological and physiological reactions that reduce the quality of potential factory logs and veneer bolts. Better information about such effects should point the way to hardwood pruning...

Forestry and deer affect each other's welfare. Forestry and other land-use practices, particularly farming, affect deer chiefly by modifying the supplies of available food and protective cover. On the other side, an overabundance of deer can overbrowse and eliminate the most palatable and nutritious food species. If these are trees that could be valuable for timber, the amount and value of future timber crops can be greatly reduced. If this happens, forestry may become impractical; and then an important natural resource may be sacrificed to deer (Latham 1950).

The northern hardwood forest comprises about 9 million acres in the Lake States region. Most of this timber is in Upper Michigan and Wisconsin, with lesser amounts in Minnesota, It consists primarily of sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.), yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis Britt,), basswood (Tilia americana L.), and often eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.). Although yellow birch is of considerable economic value in this forest type, it is secondary in importance to sugar maple. Only a small part of the area is in old-growth forest, and at the present rate of cutting these...

A study of crown characteristics of several hundred open-grown oak, hickory, and Norway spruce trees in Iowa revealed a high correlation between stem diameter and crown area. Consideration of this relationship led to the idea that perhaps here was a realistic way to measure and evaluate stand density or stocking. If, given unlimited growing space, trees of a certain species and diameter developed crowns of almost identical size, why couldn't the extent to which this development is limited in a forest stand be used as an index of stand density?

A stump tally is one method of determining the volume of timber previously removed from an area in a logging operation. To estimate volume of standing timber from stumps, foresters must first know the relationship between stump diameters and tree diameters at breast height (d.b.h.).