Uneven-Aged Management of Spruce Fir Forests
Overview
Uneven-aged or multi-cohort management represents one possible strategy for meeting a range of goals in spruce-fir forests, including goals related to aesthetics, wildlife habitat, emulation of desired disturbance scales and frequencies, and carbon sequestration. However, existing guidelines for spruce-fir management were developed without explicit attention to these objectives, and may even yield negative discounted financial returns.
This web site provides a summary and research products from a project, “Balancing Economic Productivity and Structural Diversity in Uneven-Aged Spruce-Fir Forests,” funded by Theme 1 of the Northeastern States Research Cooperative (http://www.uvm.edu/envnr/nsrc/).
Publications and Research Tools
Some background on the BDq method, including history, advantages, and pitfalls for Northeastern forests, can be found in this presentation, with an accompanying paper here.
A presentation giving an overview of forest management for carbon is here.
It turns out that if diameter distributions follow the BDq specification, and if biomass or carbon allometric equations have the usual “power function” form, then the ratio of aboveground carbon in live trees to basal area (the “CBAR”, or carbon to basal area ratio) is nearly constant for a given species. An overview of this result can be found in this poster presented at the 2010 New England Society of American Foresters meeting.
One question that comes up from time to time is whether uneven-aged silviculture provides greater carbon storage on the landscape over time than even-aged approaches. The answer is not so simple, as discussed in this poster, also from the 2010 NESAF meeting.
Publications to Appear Soon
We have developed several publications related to this project which are in various stages of the peer-review process. Peer-review is important because it provides an independent check on the quality of research. The peer-review process occasionally results in significant revisions or improvements to works before they are published, so we will be posting these papers once they are in final form. Papers we expect to post soon include
· Practical approaches for performing calculations related to the BDq method
· An overview of optimization using growth and yield models, with specific results for spruce-fir
· Theory and empirical results for the “CBAR” approach