Treesearch

Darn those town ants!" These, and stronger words, are heard time and again in the hill country of east Texas and west-central Louisiana--the only part of the world that this ant calls home.

Yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera L.) occurs naturally throughout the eastern and central United States from southern New England west to Michigan and south to Florida and Louisiana. Because of its wide occurrence, yellow-poplar grows under a variety of climatic, edaphic, and biotic conditions. Combinations of these different environmental conditions are associated with several broad physiographic regions such as the central valleys, northern and southern Appalachians, Piedmont Plateau, and coastal plain.

Southern pulpwood production reached 24,230,728 cords in 1961--60 percent of the Nations total. Significant increases were noted in the consumption of hardwood and residues. But pine roundwood remained virtually unchanged for the third consecutive year.

The white-tailed deer, one of this country's most popular forest game species, is essentially a browsing ruminant. Its diet is chiefly tender shoots, twigs, and leaves, a wide assortment of herbaceous foodstuffs, mast, and certain fruits. Browse, by far, makes up the bulk of its diet. This paper offers land managers information about some of the more important deer browse plants of southern forests.

This paper reports initial trials of an artificial soil profile constructed on sloping ground to test the theory that long slow drainage of soil moisture sustains base flow in mountain streams. Work is continuing which is expected to prove or dis- prove these preliminary results.

Full and empty seeds of most longleaf pine trees (Pinus palustris Mill.) can be separated with a high degree of reliability by examining the hila. In this species the hilum, which marks the place where the seed was attached to the cone scale, is large enough to observe without a hand lens. lt is located where the wing is joined to the seed. ln all but a very few longleaf pine trees, seeds having a distinct hilum are full, while those with a faint scar are empty. Figure 1 shows the difference in prominence of the hilum on full and empty seeds from a single tree.

IS disking before direct seeding slash pine worth the cost, or are eedbeds of light grass roughs and fr esh burns good enough? Foresters are rai ing these questions because both prepared and unprepared eedbeds are proving successful in large commercial seedings in Louisiana.

Studies by the Alexandria Research Center show that vigor and viability of longleaf pine seed can be preserved for at least 5 years if the seed is stored at the correct temperature and moisture content. Barton (1), Nelson (2), and Wakeley (1) found that low temperature and low moisture content are essential to longleaf seed storage. Their work did not include field germination, which is of great importance in direct seeding. Use of seed that had deteriorated in storage caused several failures in early seeding attempts and led to the widespread belief that only fresh seed should be sown....

Seed size influences germination of many coniferous seeds or the initial growth of the resulting seedlings (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Often both are affected. In general, large seeds have been found to germinate faster and more completely than small seeds and to produce seedlings whose initial growth is greater. The growth advantage has usually disappeared after a few years; but some authors believe the initial advantage persists, so that seedlings from large seeds usually form the dominant trees in the stand.