Treesearch

Abundance of winter flower buds, while not positive evidence, is at least a good indicator of next fall's seed crop. Management men can make good use of this information in working out their spring or early fall slash disposal program.

With rapidly growing development and uses of water, a correspondingly great demand has developed for advance estimates of the volumes or rates of flow which are supplied by streams. Therefore much attention is being devoted to hydrologic forecasting, and numerous methods have been tested in efforts to make increasingly reliable estimates of future supplies.

Standard rates specifying the amount of grass seed to sow per acre are stated in most of the more recent publications as pounds of live pure seed (lps) to be used. For a seeding project these rates must be converted to the actual amount of seed to sow because seed as purchased from the dealer or grower is never all live pure seed. Even the best lots of seed contain some dirt, chaff, broken seeds, straw, and weed seeds. Also, part of the pure seed always fails to germinate. Consequently, the standard seeding rates for live pure seed are too low for projects using seed as it is purchased.

Cluster tarweed(Madia glomerata) infests many livestock ranges in eastern Oregon, using soil moisture and nutrients that should be producing plants more valuable as forage and more effective in stabilizing watersheds. No completely satisfactory method of eliminating this obnoxious plant and replacing it, with forage has yet been found. Recent experiments in the Wallowa Mountains, however, show that simple cultivation at the proper stage of plant growth will e1iminate most of the tarweed and permit the establishment of a good stand of grass.

Significant ecological changes that effect range livestock economy are occurring as a result of logging in the 13,000,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest range lands of the Pacific Northwest. These forests provide 90 percent of the summer range area and 70 percent of the summer range grazing capacity in Eastern Oregon and Washington; about 270,000 acres undergo partial cutting each year. In many stands a second cutting is expected in about four decades. Because these cuttings alter the understory plant cover, they are of major concern to livestock owners, big game interests, and range...

A new implement, the "Brushland Plow," has been developed primarily for killing sagebrush or other undesirable shrubby plants on the rough, brushy range lands of the West. This plow, developed by the United States Forest Service, incorporates strength, flexibility, and clearance with a minimum of friction (fig. 1).

What effect does a dense cover of manzanita and snowbrush have on the establishment and growth of ponderosa pine reproduction? Observations on this point on the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest resulted in the following conclusions: (1) the brush did not significantly affect the early establishment of pine seedlings, but (2) it sharply reduced the growth of established seedlings, and (3) manzanita (Arctostaphylos sp.) is much more severe in its affect on growth of pine seedlings than snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus).

Several of you in the field administrative jobs have asked for a summary of available information from forest influences studies relating to watershed management practices. This paper hits some of the high spots, giving a brief survey of European and American studies and recommendations that may be applicable within our region. Further, it contains a few pertinent recommendations from recent local observations. We hope these notes will give you, the forest managers, some basic information for use in thinking about and discussing the subject, and some principles and methods to adapt to...

It is well known that freezing and thawing of the surface soil and humus greatly affect their capacity to absorb water. Post and Dreibelbis (1) in Ohio reported that percolation was materially reduced or ceased entirely when the frost depth was three inches or greater. They also stated that "freezing of the surface soil undoubtedly has considerable influence on the base flow of streams." Lassen and Munns (2) concluded that the structure, penetration, persistence, and areal extent of frost are directly influenced by the vegetative cover, especially forest, and by snow, Observations in this...

In the past decade or two sustained yield management has been emphasized as never before in the Douglas-fir region. It would be difficult to cite all the economic and technological factors that have encouraged landowners to grow timber as a crop. But one of the most potent sources of encouragement is the fund of technical information on timber growth, silviculture, and fire control that has been assembled since foresters came into the western woods, The Douglas-fir yield table, the regeneration manual, systematic fire-danger measurement--these are but a fear of the improved tools available...