Treesearch

Recently we have had many requests for information about opportunities for establishing new charcoal manufacturing facilities in the Northeastern States.

Cone mortality has been a serious hindrance to the Northeastern Forest Experiment Station's interspecific hybridization work with the white pines.

Some of the first forest research done in North America was done in that lake-spangled land of forests and mountains in upper New York State that we know as the Adirondacks. The very name Adirondacks smacks of forest. The big Webster dictionary says that Adirondacks comes from a Mohawk Indian word, Hatirongtaks, which means literally, "they eat trees."

In 1951, Chaiken reported successful use of a 1 percent water emulsion of 2,4,5-T, applied in ax frills, for killing unwanted hardwoods in the southeastern Coastal Plain. Chaiken's work was an important and, in large part, original contribution; it aroused a good deal of interest among foresters concerned with stand improvement, and it spurred further investigation of frill techniques in several other forest research centers.

This annual report on forest pest conditions in the Northeast combines, for the first time, information about both the major forest insects and the major forest diseases in the region. It was prepared as an aid to those who have a concern for protecting our forests from insect and disease attacks.

A basic principle that should be recognized at the start of any forward-looking forest-management plan is that the intensity or level of management that can be profitably applied to a given tract will be controlled largely by four factors: markets, labor supply, accessibility, and site. The more favorable these factors are, the higher the intensity of management that will be economically feasible.

Charcoal manufacture has become the subject of a tremendous new interest in the Northeast in the past few years. In many communities, retailers have been unable to find enough charcoal to fill the demands - even though in the same localities there are large supplies of surplus wood that could be used in making charcoal. As a result of this unfilled demand, we have received many inquiries from people throughout the Northeast who want to know how to make and market charcoal.

This is a proposed 5-point, 5-year program for watershed-management research at the Kingston Research Center. This Center's area embraces 5 counties in southern New York and 18 counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, an aggregate of 10,247,000 acres or about 16,000 square miles. Its long axis (northeast to southwest) is about 250 miles long, and its breadth measures about 150 miles. It includes about 2 million people and its water resource supplies several million more in adjacent metropolitan areas.

The northeast is hardwood country. To be sure, central and northern Maine and the higher elevations of the Green Mountains, White Mountains, and Adirondacks have their spruce-fir; cool, moist sites throughout the region typically support some hemlock; and white pine - the original foundation of the lumber industry in North America - is widely represented by scattered stands and by individual trees intermixed with other species. But in broad panorama, the forests of the Northeast take their predominant tone and character from the hardwoods. So it was in the days of the Pilgrims; and so it...

Station Paper No. 77, issued in 1955, was a bibliography of articles on forest genetics and forest tree improvement that were published in 1954. It was prepared at the request of the Committee of Forest Tree Improvement, Society of American Foresters. This second annual bibliography includes articles published in 1955 and a few articles published in 1954 that were not included in the first bibliography. It is apparent that the boom in forest genetics, mentioned in the introduction of the 1954 bibliography, has not subsided.