Keyword: site preparation

To masticate or not: Useful tips for treating forest, woodland, and shrubland vegetation

Forest managers use mastication to grind or shed vegetation to remove competition, prepare a site for natural or artificial regeneration, or release sapling-sized trees; or they use mastication to convert ladder fuels to surface fuels and enhance decomposition of biomass. However, determining the best mastication configuration within the context of management objectives and site limitations is challenging.

Coram Experimental Forest: 50 years of research in a western larch forest

This publication will enrich public understanding about the important contributions to science made at this and other outdoor laboratories. Coram, and other long-range research sites, provide scientific knowledge to assist resource professionals with the development of sound land management principles. This knowledge ensures healthy, sustainable, and productive ecosystems while meeting social and economic needs.

Impacts of timber harvesting on soil organic matter, nitrogen, productivity, and health of inland northwest forests

Soil organic components are important factors in the health and productivity of Inland Northwest forests. Timber harvesting and extensive site preparation (piling, windrowing, or scalping) reduces the amount of surface organic material (woody residues and forest floor layers) over large areas. Some wildfires and severe prescribed burns can have similar consequences.

Assessment of range planting as a conservation practice

Natural Resource Conservation Service Range Planting - Conservation Practice Standards provide guidelines for making decisions about seedbed preparation, planting methods, plant materials selection, seeding rate, seeding depth, timing of seeding, postplanting management, and weed control. Adoption of these standards is expected to contribute to successful improvement of vegetation composition and productivity of grazed plant communities.

Stocktype and grass suppression accelerate the restoration trajectory of Acacia koa in Hawaiian montane ecosystems

Restoring degraded mesic-montane forests represents a major challenge in maintaining functioning ecosystems throughout the tropics. A key example of this lies in Hawai‘i, where restoring native koa (Acacia koa, A. Gray) forests are a top conservation and forestry priority because of the critical habitat and high-value timber products that they provide.

Pile burning creates a fifty-year legacy of openings in regenerating lodgepole pine forests in Colorado

Pile burning is a common means of disposing the woody residues of logging and for post-harvest site preparation operations, in spite of the practice’s potential negative effects. To examine the long-term implications of this practice we established a 50-year sequence of pile burns within recovering clear cuts in lodgepole pine forests.

Effect of prescribed burning on soil moisture and germination of southwestern ponderosa pine seed on basaltic soils

Prescribed burning created a more favorable seedbed by exposing mineral soil and increasing soil moisture, resulting in a twenty-fold increase in the number of seeds germinating on burned compared to unburned sites.