Treesearch

The frequent shortages of loblolly pine seed for natural regeneration prompted investigation of ways to stimulate seed production of seed trees. Partial girdling failed because, as applied, it was too mild an injury. Fertilization was not effective with 40-year-old trees but significantly increased the cone crop of 25-year-old trees. As explained in summary, the amount of fertilizer may have been inadequate for the 40-year-old trees.

Those who have sought refuge during a storm have found a tree to be an effective umbrella for a light shower but leaky in a heavy rain. Even so, it is usually possible to stay slightly more dry under forest canopy than in the open. That is because a portion of the rain is stored on leaves and branches and eventually evaporated back to the air. The term interception is used for both the process and the amount of water thus dissipated. If one watches the rain drops, he can see how the process works. The first raindrops that strike the foliage spatter out, wetting the leaf surface. Finally...

The forests of the Mississippi Delta, which once produced some of the finest hardwood saw timber in the world, are badly in need of a weeding.

Do bottomland hardwoods make durable fence posts? To answer this question, the Southern Forest Experiment Station and the Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station have been carrying on two tests of the life of fence pasts in actual service in the Delta.

Cruising timber is ordinarily a job of sampling, in which the quantity of timber on a tract is estimated from the quantity on a part of the tract. The difficulty is to determine what part (per cent) of the tract should be sampled to attain a given level of accuracy. This article gives a rule-ofthumb that can be applied with fair reliability to most Southern forests.

Arkansas has a land area of 33.7 million acres. Fifty-seven percent, or 19.4 million acres, is in forest. Virtually all the forest land is capable of producing commercial timber, and less than 20,000 acres is withdraw from this use.

In the West, 30 percent of pulpwood requirements are supplied by logging and mill residues. Most of this material is obtained from large lumber operations. In the Southeast, where portable sawmills and small and scattered timber tracts are characteristic, salvage is more difficult. However, the tremendous volume of available material stimulates considerable interest in its possible use for paper or fibre board. For this reason, it may be helpful to know how much is now being used and for what purposes in one typical area.