FORESTRY

FORESTRY. Forestry is the scientific management of forests for the production of lumber and other resources. Although concern about the depletion of forest resources dates back to the colonial period, it was not until the 1890s that forestry came into its own in the United States. The development of the science of silviculture (tree growing) in Europe, widespread fears of unsustainable cutting of forests, and the expansion of the powers of the federal government allowed for professional foresters to seek, and in some ways to gain, significant influence over the nation's woodlands.

Gifford Pinchot exercised enormous influence over the early development of American forestry. Born into a prosperous Connecticut family and educated at Yale, Pinchot attended forestry school in Nancy, France, because there were no such institutions in the United States. He had difficulty securing employment as a professional forester upon his return in the 1890s, and took a job managing the forests of Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family's large estate in North Carolina. Soon enough, however, the federal government had need of Pinchot's expertise. In the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, Congress authorized presidents to set aside forested lands for protection from over-grazing and logging. In 1891–1892, President Benjamin Harrison set aside 16 million acres, and President Grover Cleveland added 21 million acres to the reserves. The National Forest Management Act of 1897 charged the government to "protect and preserve" forests to ensure predictable supplies of timber and water. A year later the Cornell and Biltmore forestry schools were established, and Pinchot became head of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. His influence only grew during the presidency of his friend Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, Roosevelt replaced the Division of Forestry with the United States Forest Service, also located in the Agriculture Department. Pinchot served as its head until 1910, overseeing its dramatic expansion to some 175 million acres from only 51 million at the opening of the decade.

For Pinchot and his fellow conservationists, forestry was the centerpiece of conservation, the development of natural resources to bring, as Pinchot famously put it, "greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time." Professionally trained foresters, backed by the power of the federal government, would ensure that the nation's timber and watersheds were protected from rapacious, wasteful, and monopolistic private industry as well as from corrupt political interests. Nationalism suffused this marriage of scientific expertise and federal power. As Pinchot wrote in 1900 when he persuaded his family to found the Yale School of Forestry, "What we wanted was American foresters trained by Americans in American ways for the work ahead in American forests." Forestry was as much a crusade as a scientific discipline.

Early Conservationists

If the establishment of forestry schools and the federal public lands bureaucracies signaled that forestry had come into its own, then at the same time Progressives such as Pinchot built on an older legacy of concern with forested lands. As the rapid cutting of eastern forests that began in the colonial period continued in the early Republic,

some began to forecast a national timber shortage. In James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 novel, The Pioneers, for example, one character warns of "felling the forests as if no end could be found to their treasures, nor any limits to their extent. If we go on this way, twenty years hence we shall want fuel." Foreign travelers and some domestic journalists reported exceptionally high firewood prices and the difficulty of locating timber for building construction in the urbanized Northeast. Such warnings began to influence policymakers. The 1865 annual report of the federal agriculture commissioner cast deforestation as "an impending national danger, beyond the power of figures to estimate, and beyond the province of words to express." In 1877 the secretary of the interior Carl Schurz presaged later conservation measures by calling for the establishment of federally owned forests to relieve what he thought was an impending wood shortage. Three years later, the census surveyed national forest resources for the first time.

George Perkins Marsh catalyzed this growing concern, helping to pave the way for the subsequent rise of a conservation movement. A peripatetic schoolteacher, newspaperman, and lawyer early in life, Marsh served as a Whig U.S. representative from Vermont. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor appointed him minister to Turkey and twelve years later President Abraham Lincoln chose him as minister to Italy. Struck by the contrast between classical accounts of a heavily wooded and very fertile Mediterranean and the unproductive and scrubby grasslands that he encountered, Marsh became convinced that the region was heir to an environmental catastrophe. In 1864 he published Man and Nature, where he used the story of Mediterranean deforestation to warn that what happened in Europe could happen in the United States as well.

Marsh deeply shaped the creation of American forestry not only because he made already familiar predictions of timber shortage, but also because he gave them an apocalyptic cast and offered a well-articulated solution. Deforestation, he warned, was not a simple matter of resource scarcity, but risked causing the collapse and disappearance of entire civilizations, as had happened with classical Greece and Rome. "The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant," he wrote, and "another era of equal human improvidence would reduce it to such a condition of shattered surface as to threaten barbarism and perhaps even the extinction of the species." Man and Nature presented the state control of forests as a solution to this prospective disaster. While individual owners were motivated by short-term gain, as Marsh insisted in long passages detailing the "improvident habits of the backwoodsman," the government could deploy scientific knowledge in the best long-term interests of the nation. Although the existence of large tracts of federal

and state-owned lands came to seem commonplace in the twentieth century, at the time Marsh's proposal was truly radical. American land policy, epitomized in the Homestead Act of 1862, was still designed to convert all of the public domain into private property holdings for the burgeoning nation and its land-hungry farmers.

Early Twentieth-Century Foresters

The first generation of American foresters responded to these early nineteenth-century warnings and embodied Marsh's call for the deployment of scientific expertise to regulate the chaos of the private sector. Progressive Era foresters, however, operated with much greater confidence and ambition than did their predecessors. Where Marsh warned, for example, that "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent… wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords," Pinchot breezily asserted that "the first duty of the human race …is to control the use of the earth and all that therein is." Where the earlier writers had hoped to avoid crippling timber shortages and the catastrophe of mass deforestation, early twentieth-century foresters saw themselves as contributing to the United States's position as an industrial power of global proportions.

The outlook of Pinchot and his peers had important and lasting practical implications for subsequent forestry and federal lands management. Above all, they insisted that economic productivity was the leading purpose of foresters and the national forests. The forests were an essential part of a modern economy in which each segment of society performed a specialized role. As one typical forest administrator stated in 1911:

The radiating influence of the standing forests is repeated when they are cut and utilized. The producers of the raw materials which supply the factories, which sell to the wholesalers, distributing to the retailers, who sell their wares to the wage-earners in forest and mill—are, with their employees, and the lumber companies and their employees, all more or less dependent upon the forests.

Accordingly, although more romantic thinkers such as the naturalist and author John Muir hoped that the expanding federal land system would protect distinctive landscapes as scenic refuges from an increasingly artificial urban life, Pinchot and his peers subordinated such goals to the provision of timber and reliable water supplies. Thus, in the early 1900s, Pinchot sided with the city of San Francisco in its fight to make a reservoir of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, previously part of Yellowstone National Park. Early forest managers also sought to curtail the extensive subsistence practices of those who lived near federal lands, devoting significant resources to ending illegal hunting and "timber poaching" for fear that they interfered with their mission to make the forests pay.

The foresters' belief in state-led economic modernization led them to practice a highly interventionist form of land management. They sought to increase dramatically the rate of timber harvest, not only because the nation needed more wood products, but also because scientific forestry seemed to demand younger forests. Older forests, which dominated the heavily timbered West, lost more wood to tree death, insect infestation, and fires than they gained from new growth. Extensive cutting of old growth would thus replace "decadent" or "overmature" forests with younger woods, ensuring that they created more new annual growth than they lost. The net growth could be harvested each year without diminishing the total amount of forest resources. If done properly, heavy cutting could thus best serve Pinchot's dictum that natural resources must produce "the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time."

Fighting fire was another important part of securing maximum forest productivity. Just as the federal government gave professional foresters substantial control over the nation's forested lands for the first time, a series of tremendous fires swept through them. Increased Euro-American settlement of the heavily forested portions of the West and Midwest and extensive logging, which left behind large amounts of extremely flammable downed trees, caused a rapid increase in forest fires in the early twentieth century. In 1910, the worse year, fire consumed more than five million acres of national forest, killing seventy-eight firefighters in the process. These fires not only took lives, destroyed entire towns, and reduced millions of potentially valuable trees, but they also seemed to threaten the Forest Service itself. What good did it do to turn over the nation's woods to professional foresters if they were just going to go up in smoke? Suppressing fires thus became one of the Forest Service's primary goals, and indeed many of the early reports of national forest supervisors were devoted almost entirely to fire control. Foresters' insistence that fires were unnatural events caused by human carelessness seemed to be borne out by their remarkable achievements in reducing the instance of forest fires. By 1935 fewer than 300,000 acres burned annually, and by 1980 the territory that regularly burned had been reduced by 95 percent. The Forest Service extended its fire fighting to most of the nation's private lands as well, beginning with a 1927 decision to withhold funds from states that failed to cooperate with the service's measures.

The Depression, World War II, and the Postwar Era

Just as the Progressive Era provided the opportunity for the creation of professional forestry, the New Deal created public works programs that expanded the reach of forestry. Nearly half of those employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in 1933 to provide jobs in conservation projects, worked in reforestation and forest protection projects. Some programs of other New Deal agencies, such as the Soil Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the National Recovery Administration, also stressed reforestation as part of the nation's recovery effort. In response to the Dust Bowl, nearly 217 million trees were planted under the auspices of the Prairie States Forestry Project. Foresters also intensified their fire fighting program and enjoyed greater success in extending it to lands not encompassed by the national forests. In 1935 the head of the Forest Service felt confident enough to promulgate the "10 a.m. Policy," which declared that all fires should be brought under control by ten in the morning of the day following their initial discovery. Smokey Bear, the government's ubiquitous antifire mascot, was introduced to the public in 1945.

The production demands of World War II and the postwar economic boom led to a much more vigorous implementation of foresters' long-standing management goals. Declining timber yields from private forest lands in the face of the nation's incredible economic growth prompted the Forest Service to increase massively its cutting levels. In 1944 the service contracted for 3.3 billion board feet (the standard measure of timber harvest, one square foot of wood an inch thick) to be cut from its lands, a more than threefold increase over traditional levels. By 1966 the annual cut had reached 12.1 billion board feet. From 1950 to 1966 twice as much timber was cut from national forests as had been from 1905 to 1949. Clear-cutting, the cutting of all trees in a given area, replaced more selective harvesting techniques, despite the Forest Service's previous vehement criticism of the practice. The roads built to enable high harvest levels—some 310,000 miles of actively maintained roadways by the end of the twentieth century—made the United States Forest Service the owner and manager of the largest road system in the world.

At the same time, however, important changes in postwar America created deep conflicts over the meaning and purposes of forestry. The construction of the inter-state highway system and economic prosperity allowed for the development of a truly mass outdoor tourism. Drawn by lures as diverse as skiing, car camping, wilderness backpacking, hunting, and fishing, millions of tourists flocked to the national forests. By 1976, recreational visits to the forests had increased nearly twentyfold from prewar levels. For the first time, millions of ordinary Americans had direct experiences with the nation's forests and felt that they had a personal stake in their future management. Many of these tourists were displeased by what they considered unsightly roads and clear-cuts. The Forest Service acknowledged these changes and cooperated in the passage of the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, which gave official sanction to outdoor recreation as a management goal for the first time. But growing public environmental sentiment still conflicted with intensive timber harvesting.

The Late Twentieth Century: Ecological Forestry

Other problems challenged the traditional emphasis of foresters on intensive management. In some forests, fire suppression and extensive harvesting led to dramatic shifts in the relative abundance of tree species. Often the large expanses of even-aged trees produced by clear-cutting were more vulnerable to disease and insect infestation than were the previous multi-aged stands. After decades of relative success, fire suppression struck its critics as not only ecologically suspect but also as ineffective in preventing fires. Before the full implementation of fire suppression, wildfires were frequent but generally smaller affairs that left many of the older trees alive. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the heavy accumulations of highly flammable dead and down woods helped to create massive conflagrations that killed almost all plants in their paths. Even enormous efforts to stop and put out fires, as in a large 1988 blaze in Yellowstone National Park, could fail. In 1992 the federal government spent nearly $11 billion to suppress forest fires across the country, losing thirty-two firefighters in the process. Gifford Pinchot's confidence that "forest fires are wholly within the control of men" was in shambles.

By the 1980s, some foresters responded to these developments by articulating a different vision of the purposes

and techniques of their discipline. As articulated by the ecologist Jerry F. Franklin, the New Forestry asserted the need to manage land to preserve biodiversity and complex ecosystems rather than to maximize timber production. From this perspective, forestry was more the respectful emulation of natural patterns than the application of scientific expertise to ensure economic efficiency. The training of foresters began to incorporate these new views. By the 1990s, the science of ecology had come to replace silviculture as the bedrock of the profession at many forestry schools. Within the Forest Service, advocates of this shift in management formed the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in 1989. Although the organization remained a dissident group within the bureaucracy, the Forest Service as a whole responded to the ecological critique of traditional forestry, shifting some of its resources away from timber production and toward recreation and habitat protection. In 1995, in a clear reversal of the thrust of a century of policy, the Department of Agriculture and the Interior Department announced their intention to let more wild-fires burn and even actively to restore small-scale fires to some regions.

At the end of the twentieth century, the forests covered nearly one-third of the nation's land area. Dominant tree species varied significantly by region. Douglas fir dominated the western portions of Washington and Oregon, joined by redwoods and mixed coniferous forests in California. East of these coastal woods, ponderosa pine, white pine, larch, lodgepole pine, fir, and spruce were the most heavily represented species. Hardwoods and pine are the most common trees in the generally open Plains states. The pine-dominated South was separated from the maple, birch, and beech forests of the Northeast by a large belt of oak and hickory. Alaska contained huge expanses of birch and coniferous woods.

In the year 2000, the national forests comprised 191 million acres, about one-tenth of the nation's surface. These forests never produced more than one-fifth of the nation's timber production. Some 393 million acres of forests were owned by the private sector, fully 232 million of them in individual hands. Corporations owned just over 100 million acres of forests. Although professional forestry has been closely associated with the public lands systems, private forest lands may become the object of similar debates over the purposes and techniques of the discipline.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cox, Thomas R. This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Hirt, Paul. A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since World War Two. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Langston, Nancy. Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.

Lowenthal, David. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Miller, Char, ed. American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997.

Pinchot, Gifford. The Fight for Conservation. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1910.

Pyne, Stephen J. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Robbins, William G. American Forestry: A History of National, State, and Private Cooperation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Wilkinson, Charles F. Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992.

Benjamin H.Johnson

See alsoAgriculture, Department of ; Conservation ; Lumber Industry ; National Park System .

Forestry

Forestry and its broader goals

Resource values managed in forestry

Harvesting and management

Silvicultural systems and management

Resources

Forestry is the science of harvesting, planting, and tending trees within the broader context of landscape management. Traditionally, forestry has focused on providing sustainable yields of economically important products, especially wood for the manufacture of lumber or paper, or to generate energy. Increasingly, however, forestry must consider nontraditional goods and services provided by the forested landscape, such as

populations of wildlife, recreational opportunities, aesthetics, and the management of landscapes to maintain clean air and water. Because these values can rarely be accommodated in the same area, there are often conflicts between forestry and other landscape uses. However, integrated management can often allow an acceptable, working accommodation of forestry and other resource values.

Forestry and its broader goals

Forestry is a science, but also something of an art. Forestry’s ultimate objective is to design manage forested landscapes that can yield sustainable flows of a range of goods and services. The most important of these resources are products directly associated with tree biomass, such as lumber, paper, and fuel. However, nonarboreal resource values are also important, and these must be managed in conjunction with traditional industrial products.

In many respects, forestry is analogous to agricultural science, and foresters are akin to farmers. Both deal with the harvest and management of ecological systems, and both seek optimized, sustainable yields of economically important biological commodities. Agriculture, however, deals with a greater diversity of economic species and biological products, a wider range of harvest and management systems (most of which are much more intensive than in forestry), and relatively short (usually annual) harvesting rotations. Still, the goals of forestry and agriculture are conceptually the same.

Another shared feature of forestry and agriculture is that both cause substantial ecological change. Forestry and agriculture are both undertaken in specific sites. However, in aggregate these places are numerous, and therefore entire landscapes are significantly affected. For example, populations of many native species may be reduced or even extirpated, the viability of natural communities may be placed at risk through their extensive conversion to managed ecosystems, erosion is often caused, the environment may become contaminated with pesticides and fertilizers, and aesthetics of the landscape may be degraded. One of the most important challenges to both forestry and agriculture is to achieve their primary goals of sustainable harvests while keeping the associated environmental degradations within acceptable limits.

Resource values managed in forestry

Forested landscapes support a variety of resources. Some are important to society because they can be harvested to yield commodities and profit. Others, however, are important for intrinsic reasons, or because they are important ecological goods and services. (That is, while their importance is not measured economically, they are nevertheless important to society and to ecological integrity.) Often, the different resource values conflict, and choices must be made when designing management systems. In particular, activities associated with the harvest and management of trees for profit may pose risks to other nontimber resources. Sometimes timber values are judged most important, but sometimes not.

The most important resources that modern foresters consider in their management plans are:

(1)Traditional forest products are based on harvested tree biomass. These include large logs that are cut into lumber or manufactured into laminated products such as plywood, as well as other trees that are used to produce pulp and paper or burned to generate energy. All are important forest products that are harvested to sustain employment and profits. Almost always, managing for a sustained yield of these tree-based products is the primary objective in forestry.

(2)Some species of animals are exploited for subsistence and recreation by hunters; maintaining these populations is another prominent management objective in forestry. The most important of the species hunted in forested lands in North America are large mammals such as deer, elk, moose, and bear; smaller mammals such as rabbit and hare; game birds such as grouse, ptarmigan, and quail; and sport fish such as trout and salmon. In some cases, forestry can enhance the abundance of these species, but in other cases it can damage game animal populations, and this conflict must be managed to the degree possible.

(3)Species with commercial value are another common consideration in forestry. These include fur-bearing animals such as marten, fisher, weasel, beaver, bobcat, lynx, wolf, and coyote. Foresters may also be involved in the management and protection of the habitat of river-spawning fish such as salmon.

(4)Nongame species, however, comprise the great majority in forested landscapes. Most are native, occurring in natural communities dispersed across the ecological landscape. Although few are of direct economic importance, all have intrinsic value. Forestry-related activities may threaten many of these species and their communities, creating great controversy and requiring difficult social choices. In North America, for example, there are concerns about the negative effects of forestry on endangered species such as the spotted owl and red-cockaded woodpecker, and on endangered ecosystems such as old-growth forest. These concerns may have to be addressed by declaring ecological reserves of large tracts of natural forest, in which the commercial harvesting of timber is not allowed.

(5)Recreational opportunities are another important resource value of forested landscapes. Examples include wildlife observation (such as bird watching), hiking, cross-country skiing, and driving off-road vehicles. In some cases these activities are made easier by forestry that may, for example, improve access by building roads. In other cases, it may detract from recreational values because of the noise of industrial equipment, dangers associated with logging trucks on narrow roads, and degraded habitat qualities of some managed lands.

(6)Natural beauty is another important consideration in forestry. Compared with natural, mature forests, few people consider clear-cut sites aesthetically pleasing. Foresters, on the other hand, may not share this interpretation. Societal choices must determine the most appropriate management objectives for site or landscape aesthetics in particular regions.

(7)Nonvaluated ecological goods and services are also important considerations in forestry. These include landscape’s ability to prevent erosion, maintain a particular hydrologic regime, to serve as a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide through the growth of vegetation, and to produce oxygen through photosynthesis. As noted previously, these are all significant resource values, although their importance is not always assessed in monetary terms.

Harvesting and management

Forest harvesting refers to the methods used to cut and remove trees, and they vary greatly in their intensity. Clear-cutting is the most intensive system, harvesting all trees of economic value at the same time. Clear-cuts can range from patch-cuts smaller than a hectare to enormous harvests thousands of hectares in area, sometimes undertaken to salvage timber from areas that have recently been affected by wildfire or an insect epidemic.

Strip-cutting is a system involving a series of long and narrow clear-cuts, with alternating uncut strips of forest left between. A few years after the first strip-cuts are made, tree regeneration should be well established by seeding-in from the uncut strips, which would then be harvested. Shelter-wood cutting is a partial harvest of a stand in which selected large trees are left to favor particular species in the regeneration, and to stimulate the growth of uncut trees to produce high-quality sawlogs at the next harvest, usually one or several decades later. In some respects, the shelter-wood system is a staged clear-cut, because all of the trees are harvested, but in several steps.

The least intensive method of harvesting is the selection-tree system, in which some of the larger individual trees of desired species are harvested every ten years or more, always leaving the physical integrity of the forest essentially intact.

Usually when trees are harvested, they are delimbed where they have fallen, the branches and foliage are left on the site, and the logs taken away for use. However, some harvest systems are more intensive in their removal of tree biomass from the site. A whole-tree harvest, usually used in conjunction with clear-cutting, removes all aboveground biomass. A complete-tree harvest is rare, but would include the attempted additional harvest of root biomass, as is possible on sites with peaty soils. These very intensive harvesting methods may be economically advantageous when trees are harvested for the production of industrial energy, when biomass quality is not an important consideration. However, the whole-and complete-tree methods greatly increase the removal of nutrients from the site compared with stem-only harvests, and this can be a consideration in terms of impairment of fertility of the land.

Forest management refers to those activities associated with establishing new crops of trees on harvested sites, tending the stands as they develop, and protecting them from insects and disease. As with harvesting, the intensity of management activities can vary greatly. The least-intensive management systems rely on natural regeneration of trees and natural stand development. Although relatively natural systems are softer in terms of their environmental impact, the rate of forest productivity is often less than can be accomplished with more intensive management systems.

One natural system of regeneration uses advance regeneration, or the population of small individuals of tree species that occurs in many mature forests and can contribute to development of the next stand after the overstory trees are harvested. Other natural-regeneration systems try to encourage the post-harvest establishment of desired species seedlings after the site is harvested. For some species of trees, the site must be prepared to encourage seedling establishment. This may require slash and surface organic matter to be burned, or mechanical scarification using heavy machines. Depending on the particular nature of the forest and tree species, either of the advance regeneration or seeding-in regeneration systems might be utilized with selective harvesting or with clear-cutting.

If the forester believes that natural regeneration will not be adequate, or that it would involve the wrong tree species, then a more intensive system might be used to establish the next stand. Often young seedlings will be planted to establish an even-aged, usually single-species plantation. The seedlings are started in a greenhouse, and may represent a narrow genetic lineage selected for desirable traits, such as rapid productivity or good growth form.

Once an acceptable regeneration is established, the stand may require tending. Often, undesired plants compete with the trees and interfere with their growth, making them silvicultural “weeds.” They may be dealt with by using a herbicide or by mechanical weeding. Once the growing stand develops a closed canopy of foliage, even the individual trees may start to compete among themselves and reduce the overall growth rate. This problem may be dealt with by thinning the stand, an activity in which the least productive individuals or those with poorer growth form are selectively removed, to favor productivity of the residual trees.

In some cases, the regenerating stand may be threatened by an insect outbreak capable of severely reducing productivity or even killing trees. This may be managed by protecting the stand using an insecticide. In North America, insecticides have most commonly been used to deal with severe defoliation caused by outbreaks of spruce budworm or gypsy moth, or with damage associated with bark beetles.

Silvicultural systems and management

Silvicultural systems are integrated activities designed to establish, tend, protect, and harvest crops of trees using a management plan appropriate to that larger scale. The landscape-scale management plan is typically detailed for the first five years, but it should also contain a 25-year forecast of objectives and activities. The design and implementation of silvicultural systems and management plans are among the most important activities undertaken by modern foresters.

The primary goal of forestry is generally to achieve an optimized, sustainable yield of economically important, tree-derived products from the landscape. In places where forestry focuses on the economic resource of trees, the silvicultural system and management plan will reflect that priority. However, where management of a range of resource values (that is, not just trees) is required, then integrated management will be more prominent in the system and plan.

As with the individual harvesting and management practices, silvicultural systems can be more or less intensive. An intensive system used in North America, beginning with a natural forest composed of a mixture of native species of trees might include: (1) whole-tree clear-cut harvesting of the natural forest, followed by (2) scarification of the site to prepare it for planting, then (3) an evenly spaced planting of young seedlings of a narrow genetic lineage of a single species (usually a conifer), with (4) one or more herbicide applications to release the seedlings from the deleterious effects of competition with weeds, and (5) one or more thinnings of the maturing plantation, to optimize spacing and growth rates of the residual trees. Finally, the stand is (6) harvested by another whole-tree clear-cut, followed by (7) establishment, tending, and harvesting of the next stand using the same silvicultural system. If the only objective is to grow trees as quickly as possible, this system might be used over an entire landscape.

KEY TERMS

Plantation —A tract of land on which economically desired trees have been planted and tended, often as a monoculture.

Rotation —In forestry, this refers to the time period between harvests. A forestry rotation is typically 50-100 years.

Scarification —The mechanical or chemical abrasion of a hard seedcoat in order to stimulate or allow germination to occur.

Silvicultural system —A system designed to establish, tend, protect, and harvest a crop of trees.

Silviculture —The branch of forestry that is concerned with the cultivation of trees.

Weed —Any plant that is growing abundantly in a place where humans do not want it to be.

In contrast, a much softer silvicultural system might involve periodic selection-harvesting of a mixed-species forest, perhaps every decade or two, and with reliance on natural regeneration to ensure renewal of the economic resource. However, even a system as soft as this one might pose a risk for certain nontimber resource values. For example, if certain species dependent on old-growth forest were believed to be at risk, then an appropriate management plan would have to include the establishment of ecological reserves large enough to sustain that old-growth resource value, while the rest of the land is worked to provide direct economic benefits.

Because silvicultural systems can differ so much in their intensity, they also vary in their environmental impact. As is the case with agriculture, intensive systems generally create substantially larger yields. However, intensive systems have much greater environmental impact. The challenge of forestry is to design socially acceptable systems that sustain the economic resource while at the same time accommodating concerns about the health of other resources, such as hunted and nonhunted biodiversity, old-growth forests, and ecologically important but nonvaluated goods and services that are provided by forested landscapes.

See also Deforestation.

Resources

BOOKS

Freedman, B. Environmental Ecology. 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press, 1995.

Kimmins, H. Balancing Act. Environmental Issues in Forestry. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992.

OTHER

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “Forestry” <http://www.fao.org/forestry/index.jsp> (accessed November 24, 2006).

U.S.Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. “USDA Forest Service Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2004-2008” <http://www.fs.fed.us/publications/strategic/fs-sp-fy04-08.pdf> (accessed November 24, 2006).

Bill Freedman

Forestry

Forestry is the science of harvesting, planting, and tending trees, within the broader context of the management of forested landscapes. Traditionally, forestry has focused on providing society with sustainable yields of economically important products, especially wood for the manufacturing of lumber or paper , or for the generation of energy . Increasingly, however, forestry must consider other, non-traditional goods and services provided by the forested landscape, such as populations of both hunted and non-hunted wildlife , recreational opportunities, aesthetics, and the management of landscapes to maintain clean air and water . Because not all of these values can always be accommodated in the same area, there are often conflicts between forestry and other uses of the landscape. However, the use of systems of integrated management can often allow an acceptable, working accommodation of forestry and other resource values to be achieved.

Forestry and its broader goals

Forestry is a science, but also somewhat of an art. The ultimate objective of forestry is to design and implement management systems by which forested landscapes can yield sustainable flows of a range of ecological goods and services. The most important of the resource values dealt with in forestry are products directly associated with tree biomass , such as lumber, paper, and fuel-wood. However, non-tree resource values are also important, and these must be co-managed by foresters in conjunction with the traditional industrial products.

In many respects, forestry is analogous to agricultural science, and foresters are akin to farmers. Forestry and agriculture both deal with the harvesting and management of ecological systems, and both are seeking optimized, sustainable yields of economically important, biological commodities. However, compared with forestry, agriculture deals with a greater diversity of economic species and biological products, a wider range of harvesting and management systems (most of which are much more intensive than in forestry), and relatively short harvesting rotations (usually annual). Still, the goals of forestry and agriculture are conceptually the same.

Another shared feature of forestry and agriculture is that both cause substantial ecological changes to sites and the larger landscape. The various activities associated with forestry and agriculture are undertaken in particular sites. However, in aggregate these places are numerous, and therefore entire landscapes are affected. Inevitably, these activities result in substantial ecological changes, many of which represent a significant degradation of the original ecological values. For example, populations of many native species may be reduced or even extirpated, the viability of natural communities may be placed at risk through their extensive conversion to managed ecosystems, erosion is often caused, the environment may become contaminated with pesticides and fertilizers , and aesthetics of the landscape may be degraded. One of the most important challenges to both forestry and agriculture is to achieve their primary goals of maintaining sustainable harvests of economically important commodities, while keeping the associated environmental degradations within acceptable limits.

Resource values managed in forestry

Forested landscapes support a variety of resource values. Some of these are important to society because they are associated with natural resources that can be harvested to yield commodities and profit. Other values, however, are important for intrinsic reasons, or because they are non-valuated but important ecological goods and services. (That is, their importance is not measured in monetary units, but they are nevertheless important to society and to ecological integrity . Some of these nonvaluated resources are described below.) Often, there are substantial conflicts among the different resource values, a circumstance that requires choices to be made when designing management systems. In particular, activities associated with the harvesting and management of trees for profit may pose risks to other, non-timber resources. In any cases of conflict among management objectives, societal choices must be made in order to assign emphasis to the various resource values. Sometimes timber values are judged to be most important, but sometimes not.

The most important of the resources that modern foresters consider in their management plans are the following:

1. Traditional forest products are based on harvested tree biomass. These include large-dimension logs that are cut into lumber or manufactured into laminated products such as plywood, and more varied sizes of trees used for the production of pulp and paper, or burned to generate energy for industry or homes. These are all economically important forest products, and they are harvested to sustain employment and profits. Almost always, managing for a sustained yield of these tree-based products is the primary objective in forestry.
2. Some species of so-called game animals are exploited recreationally (and also for subsistence) by hunters and maintenance of their populations is often a prominent management objective in forestry. The most important of the species hunted in forested lands in North America are large mammals such as deer , elk, moose , and bear; smaller mammals such as rabbit and hare; gamebirds such as grouse , ptarmigan, and quail ; and sportfish such as trout and salmon . In some cases, forestry can enhance the abundance of these species, but in other cases forestry can damage populations of game animals, and this conflict must be managed to the degree possible.
3. Species that sustain a commercial hunt are another common consideration in forestry. Terrestrial examples of this type of non-tree economic resource arefur-bearing animals such as marten, fisher, weasel, beaver, bobcat, lynx, wolf, and coyote. Foresters may also be involved in the management and protection of the habitat of river-spawning fish such as salmon, which are commercially exploited in their marine habitat.
4. So called non-game species comprise the great majority of the species of forested landscapes. Most of these elements of biodiversity are native species, occurring in natural communities dispersed across the ecological landscape. Although few of these species are of direct economic importance, all of them have intrinsic value. Forestry-related activities may pose important threats to many of these species and their communities, and this can engender great controversy and require difficult social choices about the priorities of resource values. For example, in North America there are concerns about the negative effects of forestry on endangered species such as the spotted owl and red-cockaded woodpecker, and on endangered ecosystems such as old-growth forest. To some degree, these concerns will have to be addressed by declaring ecological reserves of large tracts of natural forest, in which the commercial harvesting of timber is not allowed.
5. Recreational opportunities are another important resource value of forested landscapes, and these may have to be maintained or enhanced through the sorts of forestry activities that are undertaken. Examples of forest recreation include wildlife observation (such as bird watching), hiking, cross-country skiing, and driving off-road vehicles. In some cases these activities are made easier through forestry which may, for example, improve access by building roads. In other cases, forestry may detract from recreational values because of the noise of industrial equipment, dangers associated with logging trucks on narrow roads, and degraded habitat qualities of some managed lands.
6. The visual aesthetics of sites and landscapes is another important consideration in forestry. Aesthetics are important in recreation, and for intrinsic reasons such as wilderness values. Compared with natural, mature forests , many people consider recently clear-cut sites to have very poor aesthetics, although this value is often judged to have improved once a new forest has re-established on the site. In contrast, foresters may not share this interpretation of the aesthetics of the same sites. Clearly, aesthetics are partly in the mind of the beholder. Societal choices are required to determine the most appropriate management objectives for site or landscape aesthetics in particular regions.
7. Non-valuated, ecological goods and services are also important considerations in forestry. Examples of these ecological values include the ability of the landscape to prevent erosion, to maintain a particular hydrologic regime in terms of the timing and quantities of water flow, to serve as a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide through the growth of vegetation, and to serve as a source of atmospheric oxygen through the photosyn-thesis of growing plants. As noted previously, these are all significant resource values, although their importance is not assessed in terms of dollars.

Harvesting and management

Forest harvesting refers to the methods used to cut and remove trees from the forest. Harvesting methods vary greatly in their intensity. Clear-cutting is the most intensive system, involving the harvest of all trees of economic value at the same time. The areas of clear-cuts can vary greatly, from patch-cuts smaller than a hectare in size, to enormous harvests thousands of hectares in area, sometimes undertaken to salvage timber from areas that have recently been affected by wildfire or an insect epidemic . Strip-cutting is a system involving a series of long and narrow clear-cuts, with alternating uncut strips of forest left between. A few years after the first strip-cuts were made, tree regeneration should be well established by seeding-in from the uncut strips, and the uncut strips would then be harvested. Shelter-wood cutting is a partial harvest of a stand, in which selected, large trees are left to favor particular species in the regeneration, and to stimulate growth of the uncut trees to produce high-quality sawlogs at the time of the next harvest, usually one or several decades later. In some respects, the shelterwood system can be viewed as a staged clear-cut, because all of the trees are harvested, but in several steps. The least intensive method of harvesting is the selection-tree system, in which some of the larger individual trees of desired species are harvested every ten or more years, always leaving the physical integrity of the forest essentially intact.

Usually when trees are harvested, they are de-limbed where they have fallen, the branches and foliage are left on the site, and the logs taken away for use. However, some harvest systems are more intensive in their removal of tree biomass from the site. A whole-tree harvest, usually used in conjunction with clear-cutting, involves removal of all of the above-ground biomass. A complete-tree harvest is rare, but would attempt the additional harvest of root biomass, as is possible on sites with peaty soils. These very intensive harvesting methods may be economically advantageous when trees are being harvested for the production of industrial energy, for which the quality of the biomass is not an important consideration. However, the whole-tree and complete-tree methods greatly increase the removal of nutrients from the site compared with stem-only harvests, and this can be a consideration in terms of impairment of fertility of the land.

Forest management refers to the activities associated with establishing new crops of trees on harvested sites, tending the stands as they develop, and protecting them from insects and diseases. As was the case with harvesting, the intensity of management activities can vary greatly. The least intensive management systems rely on natural regeneration of trees and natural stand development. Although relatively natural systems are softer in terms of their environmental impacts, the rate of forest productivity is often less than can be accomplished with more intensive management systems.

One natural system of regeneration utilizes the socalled advance regeneration, or the population of small individuals of tree species that occurs in many mature forests, and is available to contribute to development of the next stand after the overstory trees are harvested. Other systems of natural regeneration try to encourage the post-harvest establishment of seedlings of desired tree species after the site is harvested. For some species of trees, the site must be prepared to encourage seedling establishment. This may require burning of the slash and surface organic matter , or mechanical scarification using heavy machines. Depending on the particular nature of the forest and the tree species, either of the advance regeneration or seeding-in regeneration systems might be utilized along with selective harvesting, or with clear-cutting.

If the forester believes that natural regeneration will not be adequate in terms of density , or that it would involve the wrong species of trees, then a more intensive system might be used to establish the next stand of trees. Often, young seedlings of desired species of trees will be planted, to establish an even-aged, usually single-species plantation. The seedlings are previously grown under optimized conditions in a greenhouse, and they may represent a narrow genetic lineage selected for desirable traits, such as rapid productivity or good growth form.

Once an acceptable regeneration of trees is established on a harvested site, the stand may require tending. Often, non-desired plants are believed to excessively compete with the trees and thereby interfere with their growth. As such, these plants are considered to be silvi-cultural "weeds." This management problem may be dealt with by using a herbicide, or by mechanical weeding. Similarly, once the growing stand develops a closed canopy of foliage, the individual trees may start to excessively compete among themselves, reducing the overall growth rate. This problem may be dealt with by thinning the stand, an activity in which the least productive individuals or those with poorer growth form are selectively removed, to favor productivity of the residual trees.

In some cases, the regenerating stand may be threatened by a population outbreak of an insect capable of severely reducing productivity, or even killing trees. This pest-management problem may be managed by "protect ing" the stand using an insecticide. In North America, insecticides have most commonly been used to deal with severe defoliation caused by outbreaks of spruce bud-worm or gypsy moth, or with damage associated with bark beetles .

Silvicultural systems and management

Silvicultural systems are integrated activities designed to establish, tend, protect, and harvest crops of trees. Activities associated with silvicultural systems are carried out on particular sites. However, the spatial and temporal patterns of those sites on the landscape must also be designed, and this is done using a management plan appropriate to that larger scale. The landscape-scale management plan is typically detailed for the first five years, but it should also contain a 25-year forecast of objectives and activities. The design and implementation of silvicultural systems and management plans are among the most important activities undertaken by modern foresters.

The primary goal of forestry is generally to achieve an optimized, sustainable yield of economically important, tree-derived products from the landscape. In places where the mandate of forestry is focused on the economic resource of trees, the silvicultural system and management plan will reflect that priority. However, in cases where society requires effective management of a range of resource values (that is, not just trees), then integrated management will be more prominent in the system and plan.

As with the individual harvesting and management practices described in the preceding section, silvicultural systems can be quite intensive, or much less so. An example of an intensive system used in North America might involve the following series of activities, occurring sequentially, and beginning with a natural forest composed of a mixture of native species of trees: (1) whole-tree, clear-cut harvesting of the natural forest, followed by (2) scarification of the site to prepare it for planting, then (3) an evenly spaced planting of young seedlings of a narrow genetic lineage of a single species (usually a conifer ), with (4) one or more herbicide applications to release the seedlings from the deleterious effects of competition with weeds, and (5) one or more thinnings of the maturing plantation, to optimize spacing and growth rates of the residual trees. Finally, the stand is (6) harvested by another whole-tree clear-cut, followed by (7) establishment, tending, and harvesting of the next stand using the same silvicultural system. If the only objective is to grow trees as quickly as possible, this system might be used over an entire landscape.

In contrast, a much softer silvicultural system might involve periodic selection-harvesting of a mixed-species forest, perhaps every decade or two, and with reliance on natural regeneration to ensure renewal of the economic resource. However, even a system as soft as this one might pose a risk for certain non-timber resource values. For example, if certain species dependent on old-growth forest were believed to be at risk, then an appropriate management plan would have to include the establishment of ecological reserves large enough to sustain that old-growth resource value, while the rest of the land is "worked" to provide direct economic benefits.

Because silvicultural systems can differ so much in their intensity, they also vary in their environmental impacts. As is the case with agriculture, the use of intensive systems generally results in substantially larger yields of the desired economic commodity (in this case, tree bio-mass). However, intensive systems have much greater environmental impacts associated with their activities. The challenge of forestry is to design socially acceptable systems that sustain the economic resource, while at the same time accommodating concerns about the health of other resources, such as hunted and non-hunted biodiversity, old-growth forests , and ecologically important, but non-valuated goods and services that are provided by forested landscapes.

See also Deforestation.

Resources

books

Freedman, B. Environmental Ecology. 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press, 1995.

Kimmins, H. Balancing Act. Environmental Issues in Forestry. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992.

Bill Freedman

KEY TERMS

Plantation

—A tract of land on which economically desired trees have been planted and tended, often as a monoculture.

Rotation

—In forestry, this refers to the time period between harvests. A forestry rotation is typically 50-100 years.

Scarification

—The mechanical or chemical abrasion of a hard seedcoat in order to stimulate or allow germination to occur.

Silvicultural system

—A system designed to establish, tend, protect, and harvest a crop of trees.

Silviculture

—The branch of forestry that is concerned with the cultivation of trees.

Weed

—Any plant that is growing abundantly in a place where humans do not want it to be.

Forestry

2582 ■ COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FOR THE FOX VALLEY REGION, INC.

Attn: Scholarships
4455 West Lawrence Street
P.O. Box 563
Appleton, WI 54912-0563
Tel: (920)830-1290
Fax: (920)830-1293
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.cffoxvalley.org/scholarship_fundslist.html
To provide financial assistance to upper-division and graduate students in Wisconsin who are working on a degree related to gardening.
Title of Award: Wisconsin Garden Club Federation Scholarship Area, Field, or Subject: Agricultural sciences; Botany; Environmental conservation; Environmental science; Forestry; Horticulture; Landscape architecture and design; Urban affairs/design/planning Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Graduate, Four Year College Number Awarded: Varies each year; recently, 4 of these scholarships were awarded. Funds Available: The stipend is $1,000. Duration: 1 year.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to college juniors, seniors, and graduate students at colleges and universities in Wisconsin. Applicants must be majoring in horticulture, floriculture, landscape design/architecture, botany, forestry, agronomy, plant pathology, environmental studies, city planning, land management, or a related field. They must have a 3.0 GPA or higher. Deadline for Receipt: February of each year. Additional Information: This program is sponsored by the Wisconsin Garden Club Federation. Information is also available from Carolyn A. Craig, WGCF Scholarship Chair, 900 North Shore Drive, New Richmond, WI 54017-9466, (715) 246-6242, E-mail: [email protected].

2583 ■ FEDERATED GARDEN CLUBS OF CONNECTICUT, INC.

14 Business Park Drive
P.O. Box 854
Branford, CT 06405-0854
Tel: (203)488-5528
Fax: (203)488-5528
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.ctgardenclubs.org/scholarship.html
To provide financial assistance to Connecticut residents who are interested in majoring in horticulture-related fields at a Connecticut college or university.
Title of Award: Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut Scholarship Area, Field, or Subject: Agricultural sciences; Botany; Environmental conservation; Environmental science; Forestry; Horticulture; Landscape architecture and design; Urban affairs/design/planning Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Four Year College, Graduate Number Awarded: Varies each year, depending upon the availability of funds. Funds Available: Stipends are generally about $1,000 each. Funds are sent to the recipient's school in 2 equal installments. Duration: 1 year.
Eligibility Requirements: Applicants must be legal residents of Connecticut who are studying at a college or university in the state in horticulture, floriculture, landscape design, conservation, forestry, botany, agronomy, plant pathology, environmental control, city planning, land management, or related subjects. They must be entering their junior or senior year of college or be a graduate student, have a GPA of 3.0 or higher, and be able to demonstrate financial need. Deadline for Receipt: June of each year. Additional Information: Information is also available from the Connecticut State Scholarship Chair, Mary Gray, 18 Long Hill Farm Road, Guilford, CT 06437, (203) 458-2784.

2584 ■ MINNESOTA TRAPPERS ASSOCIATION

c/o Deb Offerdahl
230 Second Street S.E.
Milaca, MN 56353
Tel: (320)982-1385
Web Site: http://www.mntrappers.com
To provide financial assistance for college to members of the Minnesota Trappers Association (MTA) and to other students working on a degree in a field related to natural resources.
Title of Award: Minnesota Trappers Association Scholarships Area, Field, or Subject: Agricultural sciences; Engineering, Agricultural; Forestry; General studies/Field of study not specified; Natural resources; Veterinary science and medicine; Wildlife conservation, management, and science; Zoology Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Undergraduate Number Awarded: 7 each year: 1 at $2,000, 2 at $1,000, 1 at $600 (the Russ Cumberland Scholarship), and 3 at $500. Funds Available: Stipends range from $500 to $2,000. Duration: 1 year.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to 1) MTA members working on an undergraduate degree in any field; and 2) other undergraduates working on a degree in agricultural engineering, agricultural science, forestry, natural resources, veterinary medicine, wildlife biology, or zoology. Applicants must be entering or enrolled in a 2- or 4-year program at an accredited college or university and have a college GPA of 2.5 or higher (entering freshmen must submit a transcript of their first term of college work before funds are released). Deadline for Receipt: June of each year. Additional Information: This program includes the Russ Cumberland Scholarship. Information is also available from Todd Roggenkamp, 28952 438th Lane, Palasade, MN 56373, (218) 768-2597.

2585 ■ NATIONAL FFA ORGANIZATION

Attn: Scholarship Office
6060 FFA Drive
P.O. Box 68960
Indianapolis, IN 46268-0960
Tel: (317)802-4321
Fax: (317)802-5321
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.ffa.org
To provide financial assistance to FFA members who are interested in majoring in agricultural and forest production in college.
Title of Award: Manistique Papers Scholarships Area, Field, or Subject: Agricultural sciences; Forestry Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Undergraduate Number Awarded: 2 each year. Funds Available: The stipend is $1,000. Funds are paid directly to the recipient. Duration: 1 year; nonrenewable.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to members who are either graduating high school seniors planning to enroll full time in college or students already enrolled in college on a full-time basis. Applicants must be working on or planning to work on a 2-year or 4-year degree in agricultural and forest production. Selection is based on academic achievement (10 points for GPA, 10 points for SAT or ACT score, 10 points for class rank), leadership in FFA activities (30 points), leadership in community activities (10 points), and participation in the Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) program (30 points). U.S. citizenship is required. Deadline for Receipt: February of each year. Additional Information: Funding for these scholarships is provided by Manistique Papers, Inc. of Manistique, Michigan.

2586 ■ NATIONAL FFA ORGANIZATION

Attn: Scholarship Office
6060 FFA Drive
P.O. Box 68960
Indianapolis, IN 46268-0960
Tel: (317)802-4321
Fax: (317)802-5321
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.ffa.org
To provide financial assistance to current or former FFA members who are interested in studying a field related to agriculture at a college or university in designated states.
Title of Award: Norfolk Southern Foundation Scholarships Area, Field, or Subject: Agribusiness; Agricultural sciences; Communications; Education; Engineering, Agricultural; Finance; Forestry; Management; Marketing and distribution Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Four Year College Number Awarded: 3 each year. Funds Available: The stipend is $1,000. Funds are paid directly to the recipient. Duration: 1 year; nonrenewable.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to members who are either graduating high school seniors planning to enroll in college or students already enrolled in college. Applicants must be interested in working full time on a 4-year degree in agricultural and forestry production, communication, education, engineering, finance, management, marketing, merchandising, sales, or agricultural science. They must be planning to attend a college or university in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia. Selection is based on academic achievement (10 points for GPA, 10 points for SAT or ACT score, 10 points for class rank), leadership in FFA activities (30 points), leadership in community activities (10 points), and participation in the Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) program (30 points). U.S. citizenship is required. Deadline for Receipt: February of each year. Additional Information: Funding for these scholarships is provided by the Norfolk Southern Foundation.

2587 ■ NATIONAL FFA ORGANIZATION

Attn: Scholarship Office
6060 FFA Drive
P.O. Box 68960
Indianapolis, IN 46268-0960
Tel: (317)802-4321
Fax: (317)802-5321
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.ffa.org
To provide financial assistance to FFA members from designated states who are interested in studying a field related to agriculture in college.
Title of Award: Wilbur-Ellis Company Scholarships Area, Field, or Subject: Agribusiness; Agricultural sciences; Agriculture, Economic aspects; Animal science and behavior; Biochemistry; Business administration; Computer and information sciences; Entomology; Finance; Forestry; Genetics; Horticulture; Management; Marketing and distribution; Poultry science; Soil science Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Four Year College Number Awarded: 13 each year: 1 at $5,000, 2 at $2,000, and 10 at $1,000. Funds Available: Stipends are $5,000, $2,000, or $1,000 per year. Funds are paid directly to the recipient. Duration: 1 year; nonrenewable.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to members who are graduating high school seniors planning to enroll or college students currently enrolled full time. Applicants must be residents of the following states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, or Wyoming. They must be planning to work on a 4-year degree in agricultural production, forest management, agronomy and crop science, animal nutrition, farm and ranch management, horticulture, nursery and landscape management, plant science, poultry science, general agriculture, business management, economics, international agriculture, finance, sales and marketing, biochemistry, biotechnology, computer systems in agriculture, entomology, plant breeding and genetics, plant pathology, range science, or soil science. Their combined SAT score must be 1000 or higher and their GPA must be 3.0 or higher. Selection is based on academic achievement (10 points for GPA, 10 points for SAT or ACT score, 10 points for class rank), leadership in FFA activities (30 points), leadership in community activities (10 points), and participation in the Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) program (30 points). Financial need is also considered in the selection process. U.S. citizenship is required. Deadline for Receipt: February of each year. Additional Information: Funding for this scholarship is provided by the agriculture division of the Wilbur-Ellis Company.

2588 ■ OREGON STUDENT ASSISTANCE COMMISSION

Attn: Grants and Scholarships Division
1500 Valley River Drive, Suite 100
Eugene, OR 97401-2146
Tel: (541)687-7395
Free: 800-452-8807
Fax: (541)687-7419
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.osac.state.or.us
To provide financial assistance for college to Eagle Scouts in Oregon interested in studying fields related to wildlife management.
Title of Award: Royden M. Bodley Scholarship Area, Field, or Subject: Environmental conservation; Environmental science; Forestry; Wildlife conservation, management, and science Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Undergraduate Number Awarded: Varies each year; recently, 5 of these scholarships were awarded. Funds Available: The stipend is at least $1,400. Duration: 1 year.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to graduates of high schools in the Boy Scouts of America Cascade Pacific Council. Applicants must have achieved the Eagle rank in Oregon and be attending or planning to attend college in the state. They must be interested in majoring in forestry, wildlife, environment, or a related field. Deadline for Receipt: February of each year. Additional Information: This program is administered by the Oregon Student Assistance Commission (OSAC) with funds provided by the Oregon Community Foundation, 1221 S.W. Yamhill, Suite 100, Portland, OR 97205, (503) 227-6846, Fax: (503) 274-7771.

2589 ■ VERMONT STUDENT ASSISTANCE CORPORATION

Champlain Mill
Attn: Scholarship Programs
P.O. Box 2000
Winooski, VT 05404-2601
Tel: (802)654-3798; 888-253-4819
Fax: (802)654-3765
E-mail: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.vsac.org
To provide financial assistance to residents of Vermont who are interested in majoring in an agriculture-related field in college.
Title of Award: Vermont Feed Dealers and Manufacturers Association Scholarship Area, Field, or Subject: Agribusiness; Agricultural sciences; Animal science and behavior; Botany; Equine studies; Forestry; Horticulture; Soil science; Veterinary science and medicine Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Undergraduate Number Awarded: Varies each year; recently, 6 of these scholarships were awarded. Funds Available: The maximum stipend is $3,000. Duration: 1 year; recipients may reapply.
Eligibility Requirements: This scholarship is available to high school seniors, high school graduates, and currently-enrolled college students in Vermont who are enrolled or planning to enroll in a postsecondary degree program in agriculture, including but not limited to animal sciences, equine studies, agribusiness, plant and soil science, forestry, horticulture, and veterinary medicine or technology. Selection is based on a letter of recommendation and required essays. Deadline for Receipt: June of each year.

2590 ■ VIRGINIA DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

c/o Catherine Rafferty, Scholarship Chair
10101 Sanders Court
Great Falls, VA 22066-2526
Web Site: http://www.vadar.org/vadarscholarships.htm
To provide financial assistance to high school seniors in Virginia who wish to study designated fields in college.
Title of Award: Virginia DAR Scholarships Area, Field, or Subject: Environmental conservation; Environmental science; Forestry; Genealogy; History, American; Home Economics; Medicine; Science Level of Education for which Award is Granted: Undergraduate Number Awarded: 2 each year: 1 at $1,000 and 1 at $500. Funds Available: Stipends are $1,000 or $500. Duration: 1 year.
Eligibility Requirements: This program is open to seniors graduating from high schools in Virginia who plan to attend a Virginia college or university. Applicants must be planning to work on a degree in the field of science, medicine, conservation, ecology, forestry, home arts, genealogical research, or American history. Along with their application, they must submit a 1,000-word letter giving their reasons for interest in the scholarship, a transcript of grades, a letter of recommendation from a teacher in their chosen field, and documentation of financial need. Deadline for Receipt: January of each year.

Forestry

Forestry is usually defined as the science of the harvesting, planting, and tending of trees, primarily in managed forested landscapes. In the first 250 years after Europeans came to North America, little or no effort was made to protect the continent's forest resources. Most people thought they could harvest trees without limit almost anywhere. The vastness of the North American continent gave the impression that an unlimited supply of timber was available.

By the late nineteenth century, however, some individuals saw the foolishness of this philosophy. Vast forest areas in the eastern and midwestern United States had been totally cleared of trees. Similar efforts to cut down and use trees as rapidly as possible were occurring at the nation's last frontier, the Far West. At this point, a movement was initiated to think more carefully about the nation's forest resources. People began to develop plans either to preserve or conserve those resources. Preservation meant protecting forests entirely from human use, while conservation meant using forest resources wisely to ensure that they would be available for future generations. Out of this movement grew the modern science of forestry in the United States.

Words to Know

Clear-cutting: A forest harvesting system that involves the cutting of all trees of economic value in a given area at the same time.

Conservation: The act of using natural resources in a way that ensures that they will be available to future generations.

Forest harvesting: Methods used to cut and remove trees from the forest.

Game animal: An animal that is hunted for food or recreational purposes.

Herbicide: Any chemical that kills plants.

Natural regeneration: A method of growth in which foresters rely largely on natural processes for trees to regrow in an area.

Prescribed burn: The controlled burning of vegetation in an area to achieve some effect.

Preservation: The act of protecting a natural resource from any human use.

Regeneration: The process by which the trees in a forest ecosystem are restored over time.

Selection-tree system: A forest management system in which some of the larger individual trees of a desired species in an area are harvested every ten or more years.

Shelter-wood cutting: A forest management technique in which certain large trees are left behind in an area that is otherwise cut.

Silviculture: The branch of forestry that is concerned with the cultivation of trees.

Strip-cutting: A forest management system in which long and narrow clear-cuts are made, with alternating uncut strips of forest left between.

Forestry and agriculture

In many respects, forestry is similar to agricultural science, and foresters are comparable to farmers. Forestry and agriculture both deal with the harvesting and management of ecological systems. Both fields also look for ways to make the best possible use of land to produce valuable products. However, some important differences between the two fields exist. In the first place, agriculture deals with a greater variety of species and products, while forestry deals essentially with one species: trees. In addition, farmers deal with a wider range of harvesting and management systems, most of which are much more intensive than in forestry. Finally, agriculture involves relatively short harvesting rotations, with most crops being planted and harvested once a year. Still, the goals of forestry and agriculture are very much alike: harvesting and managing crops to produce ongoing yields of organic products that are required by society.

Another shared feature of forestry and agriculture is that both substantially deteriorate the original ecosystems of the area. For example, populations of many native species of plants and animals may be reduced, threatened, or even eliminated. The soil is often eroded, the environment may become contaminated with pesticides and fertilizers, and the beauty of the landscape may be degraded. One of the most important challenges to both forestry and agriculture is to achieve their primary goals of maintaining harvests while keeping the environmental damage within acceptable limits.

Goals of forest management

Forests are important for a number of reasons. They are used to provide a vast array of products that include lumber, plywood, pulp and paper, and other wood products. Many fish (particularly salmon) and furbearing animal species (marten, fisher, and beaver) that live in forested lands are valuable commodities. Forests are home to species of game animals such as deer, rabbits, and quails that are hunted for food and for recreational purposes. But the great majority of the species of forested landscapes are nongame animals which, though not economically important, are nonetheless valuable.

Forests also provide people with recreation: bird watching and other wildlife observation, hiking, and cross-country skiing. And many people enjoy forests simply for their great beauty. Forests also play a vital role in the ecology of the planet. In addition to preventing erosion and helping to maintain the water cycle, these stands of trees provide atmospheric oxygen.

Highly publicized, intense debates rage as to the best possible uses of forest resources. For instance, in North America there are concerns about the negative effects of forestry on endangered species, such as the spotted owl and red-cockaded woodpecker, and on endangered ecosystems, such as old-growth forests. In a few cases, these concerns have been addressed by declaring large tracts of natural forests to be off limits to commercial harvesting of timber. In general, however, logging industry interests are seen as having a higher value to society.

Harvesting and management

There are a number of methods used to cut and remove trees from the forests. Forest harvesting methods vary greatly in their intensity. Clear-cutting is the most intensive system, involving the harvest of all trees of economic value at the same time. The areas of clear-cuts can vary greatly, from cuts smaller than a hectare in size to enormous harvests thousands of hectares in area.

Strip-cutting is a system in which long and narrow clear-cuts are made, with alternating uncut strips of forest left between. One advantage of strip-cutting is seeds from uncut trees fall into the harvested strips, and new trees soon begin to grow there.

Shelter-wood cutting is a technique in which certain large trees are left behind in an area that is otherwise cut. The large trees produce seeds from which the next generation of trees will be born. In addition, the large trees will be even larger at the time of the next cutting in the area.

The least intensive method of harvesting is the selection-tree system. In this system, some of the larger individual trees of a desired species are harvested every ten or more years. The forest overall, however, is always left essentially intact.

Regeneration. Forest management involves decisions not only as to how trees are to be harvested, but how the forest is to be regenerated. Ideally, one might hope that a new tree grows in an area for every older tree that was taken out. One method for dealing with this problem is natural regeneration. Natural regeneration refers to the practice of simply allowing a forested area to grow back on its own, once trees have been harvested. Natural regeneration can be aided by humans in a number of ways, such as leaving younger trees in place while only larger trees are harvested and preparing the ground to increase the rate of germination for tree seeds.

Natural regeneration is an ecologically responsible way to promote the regrowth of a forest area. But the process often takes a great deal of time and, therefore, may not be economically desirable.

More managed forms of regeneration are also possible. For example, young seedlings of valuable tree species may be planted and grown in greenhouses before being transplanted to the forest. This technique assures that high-quality trees of just the right species will grow in a particular area.

Once an acceptable population of trees has been planted in an area, intensive tending may be needed to protect these trees from forest fires, attack by pests, and intrusion of undesirable species. This form of management is very time-consuming, and is more likely used on tree farms.

One of the more widely used methods of forest management is known as a prescribed burn. A prescribed burn is the controlled burning of vegetation to achieve some effect. Most commonly, fires are intentionally set to reduce the amount of logging debris present after clear-cutting.

This practice is generally undertaken to make the site more accessible to tree planters.

Sometimes prescribed burns are also useful in developing better seedbeds for planting tree seedlings. Prescribed burns also can be used to encourage natural regeneration by particular types of trees that are economically valuable, such as certain species of pines. When using fire for this purposes, it is important to plan for the survival of an adequate number of mature seed trees. If this is not accomplished, the burned site would have to be planted with seedlings grown in a greenhouse.

Silviculture

Silviculture is a special field of forest management that involves the development of activities designed to establish, tend, protect, and harvest crops of trees, especially for use as timber. The term silviculture was invented to compare its activities with those of agriculture. Whereas agriculture deals with a great variety of different crops, silviculture (silvi means "trees") deals with trees only.

As with forestry systems in general, silviculture can use techniques ranging from entirely natural to highly intensive. An example of an intensive system used in North America might involve the following series

of activities: (1) whole-tree clear-cut harvesting of the natural forest, followed by (2) breaking up of the surface of the site to prepare it for planting, then (3) an evenly spaced planting of young seedlings of a very specific type of a single species (usually a conifer), with (4) one or more applications of herbicides to free seedlings from the harmful effects of competition with weeds, and (5) one or more thinnings of the maturing plantation, to optimize spacing and growth rates of the residual trees. Finally, the stand is (6) harvested by another whole-tree clear-cut, followed by (7) establishment, tending, and harvesting of the next stand using the same silvicultural system.

In contrast, a more natural silvicultural system might involve periodic selection and harvesting of a mixed-species forest, perhaps every decade or two, and with reliance on natural regeneration to ensure renewal of the economic resource.

Because silvicultural systems can differ so much in their intensity, they also vary in their environmental impacts. As is the case with agriculture, the use of intensive systems generally results in substantially larger yields of the desired economic commodity, in this case, trees. However, intensive systems have much greater environmental impacts associated with their activities.

[See also Forests ]