Timber Management

Authored By: T. R. Fox, R. R. Hicks, Jr.

The South is blessed with abundant and diverse forest resources. Today, forests cover approximately 215 million acres in the South, which represents 29 percent of the forest land in the United States (Conner and Hartsell 2002). Maintaining the productivity of these forests is essential to the economic, environmental, and social well being of the South and the Nation. The forest products industry ranks among the top industries in most Southern States and is the largest industry in several. The wood products sector contributed 770,000 direct jobs and over $120 billion in total industry output in 1997 (Abt and others 2002).

The diversity of forest ecosystems in the South is also large, ranging from mixed, mesophytic hardwood forests of the Southern Appalachians, to the planted pine forests of the Coastal Plain and Piedmont, to the bottomland hardwood forests along major rivers throughout the region. In 1999 there were 65 million acres of upland hardwood forests, 30 million acres of bottomlan hardwoods, 29 million acres of mixed pine-hardwood forests, 33 million acres of natural pine, and 30 million acres of pine plantations in the South excluding Kentucky (Conner and Hartsell 2002). These forests provide a wide variety of goods and services other than timber, including a diverse range of habitat for wildlife, recreational opportunities, and clean air and water. These goods and services contribute to an improved quality of life for an increasing population that has become more urbanized. Modern forest management regimes must provide these noncommodity benefits.

Management practices have been developed and refined for each of the major forest types in the South since the advent of scientific forestry at the Biltmore Estate led by the work of Olmstead, Pinchot, and Schenck in the 1890s. Although tremendous strides have been made in the management of most forest types, progress has been uneven. Economic factors associated with the development of southern pine-based pulp and paper industry, which started in the 1920s and 1930s, fostered the development of pine plantation management using an agronomic approach. The work of research scientists and practicing foresters in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service (Forest Service), southern forestry schools and universities, State forestry agencies, and private industry in pine tree improvement and intensive silvicultural practices has greatly improved the productivity of southern pine plantations. Similar but less sustained efforts were periodically directed toward intensive management of plantation hardwoods, generally with mixed results. The research efforts directed toward the management of natural hardwood, pine, and mixed hardwood-pine stands have been less concerted than that associated with intensive pine plantation silviculture. However, individual research programs within the Forest Service and at several southern forestry schools have maintained a strong and consistent focus on these forest types. Most notable are the Forest Service research units at Bent Creek and Coweeta focused on upland hardwoods, the program at Mississippi State University on silviculture of bottomland hardwoods, the industry-sponsored Hardwood Research Cooperative at North Carolina State University, which has strong programs in both upland and bottomland hardwoods, and the Forest Service Research Work Unit at Crossett, AR, that has developed uneven-aged silvicultural systems for southern pines.

This section is a synthesis of the scientific knowledge about the silviculture and management of the 6 major forest types used for timber production in the South.