Forest Management
Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest Silviculture
For as long as humans have inhabited what we now call Southwest Montana, they’ve shaped the landscape—and forest—to meet their needs. While names and methods have changed over time, we continue to manage the forest to meet the diverse requirements and values of landowners and society.
What is silviculture?
Silviculture is the science of controlling the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests and woodlands. The goal of our silviculture program is to sustainably manage the forest for issues like wildlife habitat, timber, water resources, restoration, and recreation. The primary species that comprise our forest are lodgepole pine, Douglas fir, spruce fir, subalpine fir, and whitebark pine.
Reforestation efforts
Following a disturbance or regeneration harvest, we’re required to ensure that the landscape is adequately stocked with the appropriate species of timber. Most of our harvests regenerate naturally and don’t require planting. However, we plant when we want to change the composition of species in an area, such as the reintroduction whitebark pine in fire scars. We also manage test plantations across the forest, which are used to test metrics like cold-hardiness from grafted stock from the Coeur d’ Alene nursery.
A two track forest road through dense lodgepole pine forest.
Planning & the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
Environmental planning under NEPA is generally done in interdisciplinary teams. For most vegetation management projects, silviculture identifies priority treatment polygons which are based on existing conditions and their departure from desired conditions. Treatments are designed to change conditions from current to desired. These include shifts in stand density, species composition, size class distribution, age class distribution(s), and/or other structural metrics.
Implementation
Once management decisions are made, a silviculturist writes or reviews a prescription. This document describes a sequence of management actions that are designed to change the trajectory of stands from existing conditions to desired conditions.
What do prescriptions include?
| Marking guides for commercial or non-commercial treatment | Codes to enter the activities into FACTS (see below) | Timing of actions |
| Expected outcomes | Stand description | Desired future condition(s) |
| Diagnoses |
Part of implementation is monitoring. We monitor the survival of planted trees, how long it takes for natural regeneration to establish following disturbance, if our treatments are leading to desired conditions, and more.
Harvested lodgepole pine next to a forest road.
Knutson-Vandenburg (KV) Trust Fund
The silviculture program manages the Knutson-Vandenburg (KV) trust fund, which is used to hold revenue captured from commercial timber sales. This money is used for reforestation and ecological restoration activities within the sale area boundary. This fund is managed in conjunction with timber and fuels staff who manage the salvage and brush disposal funds respectively.
Data management
The silviculture program manages two Oracle databases, FACTS and FSVeg. The Forest Service Activity Tracking System (FACTS) has a tabular and spatial component where all vegetation and KV-funded activities are managed. Field sampled vegetation (FSVeg) houses inventory data collected and used to manage stands.
Combating pine beetles
The silviculture program also assists recreation staff by determining where to hang anti-aggregation pheromones to slow the spread of Douglas-fir beetle. You’ve likely seen these small, green or brown plastic packets stapled to the trunks of Douglas fir trees.
MCH bubble caps
The packets are called MCH bubble caps. They’re used to protect trees from Douglas-fir beetles, which bore into the inner bark—or phloem—of the trees to feed and reproduce. Unfortunately, when they do so in a living Douglas fir, the result is often fatal for the tree.
If you’ve ever stripped the bark from a Douglas fir (please only do so from dead trees) and noticed a vertical pattern on the wood with many smaller horizontal lines that resemble an intricate engraving, this is likely evidence of the galleries created by the beetles.
The science of pheromones
When female bark beetles find a new tree suitable for breeding, they send out a pheromone called MCOL that alerts other beetles they’ve set up in a nice, new place. Both male and female beetles then come in, colonize, and breed. As more beetles arrive and the breeding site gets crowded, the males start to release a separate pheromone called MCH, which tells other beetles to steer clear.
In the most basic sense, MCH bubble caps use the naturally occurring pheromones produced by beetles to tell passersby that the tree has no vacancy. The treatment is most effective if deployed in the spring before the beetles start to fly and attack trees, which usually happens in late April or early May, depending on temperatures. Unlike many pesticides, MCH has very little impact on the environment, although it should never be directly applied to water or consumed by humans.
While utilizing this technique throughout an entire forest isn’t possible, it gives us a tool to protect specific stands of trees in areas the publics values.