Treesearch

Although forest planting has been carried on for more than a quarter of a century in the Northern Rocky Mountain Region, the ultimate in planting practice has not yet been attained. Information on several phases of planting work has been obtained by studying all available plantation records. Results of the study are presented together with a brief description of the planting practice used in the region and a discussion of factors affecting mortality with reference to methods of increasing survival.

Controlled burning admittedly is a highly controversial procedure, but the authors show that under certain conditions when adequate precautionary measures are taken it has a definite place in western white pine forest management. More important still, the authors describe the conditions under which it is useful, the precautionary measures that must he taken, the results that may be expected, and the cost of the operation. All foresters dealing with timber management problems will find this paper of outstanding interest and value.

To determine the best species and methods to use for reseeding denuded lands as an erosion control measure.

Although the annual destruction of life and property attributable to forest fires is enormous, scientific methods of forest fire control in the United States are of comparatively recent origin. In one important phase of control, that of determining how large a network of observers is necessary for the purpose of discovering forest fires in their infancy, accurate means of determination have been largely lacking. As a result of this uncertainty, lookout points have been excessively manned in some years, thus introducing unnecessary costs, and under-manned in other years, resulting in...

The moisture content of the top layer of coniferous needles and twigs covering the forest floor is one of the factors of forest fire danger which must he determined accurately if fire danger in such timber types is to he measured. As this moisture content cannot he estimated accurately and as a difference of a few per cent of moisture, especially in the lower range, has been found to cause significantly different inflammability, measurements rather than estimates are needed.

In the measurement of fire weather and forest inflammability, now practiced regularly at more than 90 forest stations in northern Idaho and western Montana, it is necessary to use many methods that are peculiar to this work. Some of these methods are familiar to meteorologists, but few foresters have had any appreciable training in meteorology. Others are of such, recent development and so specially designed for forest protection that they are unknown to most meteorologists and are not yet taught in the schools of forestry or described in any textbooks. The information available on these...

Research in fire danger measurement was commenced in 1922 at the Northern Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station of the U. S. Forest Service, with headquarters at Missoula, Mont. Since then investigations have been made concerning ( 1) what to measure, (2) how to measure, and ( 3) field use of these measurements. In all cases the laboratory or restricted field experiments have been followed by several years of extensive application and test on the 10 fire forests of northern Idaho and western Montana, comprising an area of some 17,000,000 acres.

In the northern Rocky Mountain region a high degree of protection from fire is necessary to perpetuate forest yields and communities industrially dependent upon them. On rugged and inaccessible areas a green, healthy forest cover is needed for recreation, erosion control, and regulation of water resources. Immense conflagrations continue to challenge the forester. In this and other forest regions of the United States fire conditions have been analyzed and the analyses have been made the bases of systematic planning to reduce burned acreage.

The mapping of a fuel is simply the identification of the place where a specific kind of fire behavior and difficulty, or expense, of control are expected. The article presents, in abbreviated form, instructions issued to fuel mappers in northern Idaho and western Montana. Under this method, which was developed incidental to fire control and transportation planning, fifteen million acres of national forest fuels have been mapped to date.

The importance of vegetational studies in virgin forests has become more and more obvious during the past few years as a result of the increasing scarcity of primeval areas. The work of Cooper ('13) on Isle Royale, Michigan; of Nichols ('13) at Colebrook, Connecticut; of Lutz ('30) at Heart's Content, Pennsylvania; of Gates and Nichols ('30) studying an area near Pellston, Michigan; and of Hough ('32) in Pennsylvania, may be said to compose the greatest portion of the meagre literature on this subject.