Site quality relationships for the oak-hickory forest type
| Authors: | D.L. Graney |
| Year: | 1979 |
| Type: | Paper |
| Station: | Southern Research Station |
| Source: | North America’s forests: gateway to opportunity: Proceedings of the 1978 joint convention of Society of American Foresters and Canadian Institute of Forestry |
Abstract
The oak-hickory forest type, which covers some 111 million acres and is the largest single forest type in the United States, includes a variety of upland oak and associated hardwood species and is found on most upland soils and physiographic divisions of the central forestarea. Quantity and quality of yield of our oak-hickory forest varies greatly with site quality. To gauge returns from silvicultural treatmentsand to recommend species for management on a given site, forest land managers need reliable site quality estimates for a variety of treespecies. Information about site quality relationships for species in the oak-hickory type, although lacking for much of the central forestarea, has steadily increased over the past several years (Carmean 1970a, 1971a, 1975). Site quality is usually expressed as siteindex (the height of the dominant and codominant trees at an index age of usually 50 years), which can be measured either directlyby site curves or species comparisons or indirectly by soil survey methods or soil-site relationships .