Treesearch

Wilbur Reed Mattoon always seemed to be in motion. During his nearly 40-year career as a forest inspector, administrator, researcher, extension agent, and educator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, he crisscrossed the country. But he especially focused his energies on the Southern States, and his impact there was outsized in part because of his peripatetic approach to his work. “He had to travel a great deal,” Elwood L. Demmon, former director of the Southern Forest Experiment Station recalled in 1959, “because that was part of his job” (Maunder 1959: 28). Mattoon’s...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service faced an important decision in 1921. In July, the agency established the Appalachian Forest Experiment Station (AFES), headquartered in Asheville, NC. The immediate objective of the AFES was to study methods for increasing productivity of the heavily cutover forest lands that were being acquired for national forests. The agency needed a highly qualified forester to administer the new experiment station, someone with a research background and knowledge of local forest conditions as well as being a capable administrator and good communicator...

This study examines community incentives to participate in donor-sponsored community forestry initiatives using the case of a multi-year biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihood project in West Africa sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development. In this project, communities established community forests and prohibited most extractive uses to promote forest biodiversity conservation, receiving livelihood and water infrastructure investments in return. I assess whether livelihood investments are an effective incentive-based conservation strategy for community...

The USDA Forest Service received $5.447 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, providing substantial funding to support implementation of the agency’s 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy between fiscal years 2022 and 2026. This article examines how the agency might enhance local job creation and equity while conducting wildfire risk reduction and ecosystem restoration under the strategy using these funds. It does this by drawing on five key findings from a socioeconomic assessment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) that are applicable today....

The Hawaiian Islands are an isolated archipelago in the Pacific Ocean with diverse forests covering 1.5 million ac—36 percent of Hawaiʻi’s total land area. These forests produce wood for local use and support trade, yet large-scale timber production has never been significant in Hawaiʻi. In contrast, nontimber forest products (NTFPs), have been foundational to the culture and economy of the state throughout history and continue to be elemental to contemporary society. The rich variety of NTFPs sourced from Hawaiian forests can be observed at diverse social events and informal gatherings....

When established in 1921, the Southern Forest Experiment Station (SOFES) was headquartered in New Orleans, LA—a somewhat ironic choice, given the distance from New Orleans to the major southern forests and most of the Station’s territory (Fickle 2001). According to Forbes (1925), New Orleans had originally been seen as a temporary Station headquarters, but further study into its relative advantages soon conferred its permanence. New Orleans was near some of the southern forests most devastated by lumbering and was a regional rail transportation hub, an important consideration at a period...

Hired as a researcher in 1924, Philip C. Wakeley led the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station’s development of reforestation, tree improvement, and genetics across the South during his remarkable 40-year career. Wakeley’s seminal Planting the Southern Pines (Wakeley 1954) was built on some of his earlier works (Wakeley 1929, 1935) and provided foresters with the tools and technology to reforest the South and remains one of the most-cited references of the Forest Service. Wakeley’s studies helped convince foresters and managers of the potential...

1934, near the small town of Otto, NC, the Appalachian Forest Experiment Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, established the Coweeta Experimental Forest (later renamed the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory) (Ice and Stednick 2004, Lehman 2009). Much of the early scientific knowledge about how forests influence watershed water cycles was produced from studies at Coweeta. Indeed, much of today’s forest hydrology science—the study of water movement in forests—originated from the research at Coweeta and other experimental forests across the United States (Ice and Stednick 2004).

The Southern Forest Experiment Station (SOFES) had no formally designated experimental forests prior to the passage of the McSweeney-McNary Forest Research Act of 1928. This law legally authorized the establishment of experimental forests and with the August 1930 approval of Forest Service Regulation L-20, a process for the development of experimental forests on national forest lands emerged (Clapp 1931, 1938). While these formalized such facilities, the SOFES had not waited for these to begin such an effort—not by a long shot! To help keep track of the work at Urania, a document was...

Looking back, I recall many fond memories of my association with the Southern Institute of Forest Genetics (SIFG) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. The SIFG was “activated” by the Forest Service’s Southern Forest Experiment Station (SOFES) on August 29, 1954, to meet the following three purposes (Briegleb 1955) focus a staff with specialized training using adequate laboratory and field facilities on some of the fundamental research questions and management problems related to forest genetics, conduct an “aggressive” program of tree improvement, and serve as a repository...