Treesearch

Chemical debarking of standing trees, as an alternative to mechanical methods of peeling felled trees and bolts is of continuing interest to industries using bark-free wood for their operation. It has been tried extensively in the North, but because of possible insect and decay losses in usable wood has received less attention in the South. It has not been previously tested on bottomland hardwood species of the Mississippi Delta.

The most important cause of cull in southern hardwood forests is heart rot that develops from wounds made by fire. This study derived means by which the forester working with bottomland red oaks can determine the amount of decay behind old fire scars and estimate the rot that can be expected from new wounds.

A common timber cruising practice in the South is to tally trees in the 4- to 9-inch d.b.h. classes as pulpwood and trees in the 10-inch class and up as sawtimber. The results are then summarized and presented as cords per acre and board feet per acre, with their tacit implication that the two figures are equally valid, or approximately so. If the cordwood sampling precision is slightly less, that is considered acceptable because cordwood stumpage value is also somewhat less.

Since the introduction of plotless cruising in this country by Grosenbaugh and the later suggestion of using a wedge prism as an angle gauge by Bruce this method of determining basal area has been widely adopted in the South. One of the factors contributing to the occasionally unsatisfactory results obtained is failure to calibrate the prism used. As noted by Bruce the inexpensive prisms commonly used require the computation of a basal area factor for each prism. This is done by setting up a target of convenient width (w), sighting on it through the prism, then moving the prism forward or...

When timber is cruised using relascope, basal area and volume figures are obtained without constructing a stand table, through the use of appropriate conversion factors. Although this saving in time is very desirable for most inventories, certain management purposes require stand tables.

In these days of climbing stumpage prices it is frequently desirable to attain more precision from a relascope cruise than is possible using ready-made volume factors. Like any factors made to be approximately applicalble over a wide range of conditions, volume factors may give very misleading results under certain local condition. For this reason it is desirable to check ready-made factors under local conditions, and to calculate local factors if sufficient precision is not attained.

It is probable that a truly automatic planning operation could be devised if some of the variables commonly present in the mill-run lumber were eliminated and the remaining variables kept under close control. This paper will deal with the more general situation faced by mostl umber manufacturing plants. In other words, it will be assumed that the incoming lumber has the ordinary degree of variableness.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate avilable information on several important browse plants of the Georgia coastal plain so that their value and over-all contribution to cattle feed can be more fully assessed and compared to other kinds of forage. Numerous observation and notes pertaining to cattle diet were accumulated in the vicinity of the Alapaha Experimental range, Berrien County, Georgia, from 1942 to 1955. These provided good estimations as to the kind and amounts of browse plants eaten at various times of the year. An indication of the nutritive value of many individual...

The objective of this paper is threefold: to outline briefly some of the avenues of approach so far employed in utilizing low-grade wood, to comment on the economic aspects of the problem, and finally, to speculate about what developments the future might bring to the field of utilization.