Treesearch

After felling, skidding, delimbing and often topping, and merchandizing of trees, logs must be loaded onto a truck for the hauling of that raw woody resource to a mill. This analysis focuses on owner-operator truck drivers, or self-employed drivers, and looks at the impacts of costs per gallon of diesel ($3, $4, $5, and $6 per gallon), different log truck annual insurance rates ($10,000, $15,000, and $22,000), along with basic assumptions about hauling conditions and maintenance costs, and varying rates of salary received per load ($0.13 to $0.23 per ton per loaded mile, by $0.02 increments...

The Southwide Pine Seed Source Study (SPSSS) provided a tremendous amount of information from its inception in the early 1950s until its conclusion decades later. The silvicultural value of this genetics study, even given some design weaknesses and other limitations, continues to this day and these data will soon be available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service’s Research Data Archive. However, while preparing these data, we discovered in the original study plan documentation that most of the geographic coordinates provided for the seed sources were erroneously...

Nonnative, invasive plant species threaten the ecological and military values provided by forests at Townsend Bombing Range in southeastern Georgia. To inform effective management of invasive plants, installation-wide transect surveys were conducted in the summer of 2022 to determine the presence and abundance of invasive plant species in multiple land-cover classes. Based on these surveys, densities of major invasive plant species were greater in stand edges than in stand interiors. Japanese climbing fern (Lygodium japonicum) and Chinese tallow (Triadica sebifera) were concentrated on the...

Oaks (Quercus spp.) are frequently the most valuable bottomland species, but are often hard to regenerate. In northeastern Texas, operational shelterwoods and strip clearcuts were established in 2014 to test their effectiveness for establishing oak regeneration. Measured in 2022, basal area of the shelterwood areas recovered to 96.2 square feet per acre and the sapling size class [diameter at breast height (d.b.h.) <2 inches] increased from an initial 270 trees per acre (TPA) to 580 TPA with 26 percent oaks. The seedling layer increased to 7,371 TPA with 67 percent willow oak (Q. phellos),...

Forest plantation investment returns depend not only on survival and growth rates, but also on costs and revenues associated with various practices. Beyond that, tax-related issues are very important, but are often not addressed and thus most forest financial assessments can be defined as before-tax. Mississippi landowners can reduce reforestation cost burdens through two important tax-related opportunities. Firstly, the Federal reforestation deduction and amortization provisions, and secondly the State-based reforestation tax credit. Impacts of these two income tax reduction opportunities...

The ability to rapidly acquire biometric data in forests allows for timely decisions to be made regarding harvest, fertilization, prescribed fire, or other silvicultural treatments. High resolution tree-level data can be used to assess tree conditions and in calculating tree- or stand-level volume estimates. Using mobile, terrestrial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) units, such data collection is possible and provides an archive of present stand conditions. This study seeks to apply a mobile backpack LiDAR unit to a 3-year-old planted stand in northern Louisiana. The objective of the...

To meet objectives such as maintaining continuous forest cover and promoting multiple age classes within stands, there is interest among some landowners to convert longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) plantations to multiaged stands. However, silvicultural strategies for converting longleaf pine plantations to multiaged stands need to be developed for local site conditions. This was the aim of our study located at The Jones Center at Ichauway in southwestern Georgia. The study site included eight longleaf pine plantations that were commercially thinned in 2014 and impacted by Hurricane Michael...

Many trees exhibit a reproductive strategy known as masting where seed production is highly variable in time (Janzen 1971, Koenig 2021, Koenig and Knops 2005). Variability in weather patterns can trigger seed production leading to synchrony over large geographic areas (Pearse and others 2014). Disturbances such as drought and fire are known to stimulate masting, but little is known about whether hurricanes also stimulate seed production (Vacchiano and others 2021). Hurricanes may trigger cone production through multiple environmental stimuli associated with windstorms such as additional...

In longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystems, an objective of some landowners is to develop multiaged stands with a component of large longleaf pine trees. A potential strategy to accelerate recruitment of trees to larger size classes is to purposefully release saplings within dense patches of longleaf pine. At The Jones Center at Ichauway, we thinned patches of sapling-sized trees within mature stands. We thinned from below with the modification that some dominant and codominant trees were also cut. Before thinning, average densities within patches of two harvest areas were 712 and 1,145...