Treesearch

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.

Pine logs as small as 5 inches in diameter inside bark and trees 6 inches in diameter breast high are utilized for saw timber in the South Carolina Piedmont. More lumber is sawed from 8-inch logs than from any other size, while 12- and 14-inch trees provide nearly 50 percent of the board-foot volume cut. The bar graphs are based on measurements of 1,029 logs at 25 sawmills and 412 trees cut on 21 tracts.

At the end of every year fire organizations regularly tally up the number of fires that burned in their territory and then try to decide whether the record is good or bad. Thirteen northeastern states reported 8,948 fires in 1951 on days of known fire danger, for example. Now the question is: would it have been reasonable to expect a larger or smaller number than 8,948 for the year?

With the increasing demands made on our water supplies within the past few decades has come the realization that fundamental research concerning this basic natural resource is woefully lacking. Because the water resource is so closely linked with climate, it was the consensus of opinion for many centuries that man could alter it no more than he could the weather. This is not entirely true, for, in addition to climate, the available water supplies may be affected by the vegetation and soil factors. Through his use of the land, man exerts a very significant influence on both the vegetation...