Your Management Plan

Forest Management Plans are useful guides to keep us on track in improving and maintaining our forest ecosystems. To develop our plan, we can pay a consulting forester, or badger our district forester, or do it yourself. Of course, when we are just starting out, the forester can do a much better job. About five to ten years later though, we begin to see that the original plan is insufficient - we know more and our goals are better defined.

At this point, we can pay a consulting forester or update the plan yourself. The skills needed to write or revise a plan are relatively simple; they just take some time and effort. Most of these skills fall under the topic "Figure Out What You Have," that is, what species, how much volume and growing stock, what kind of sites and soils. So, these skills fit into step 2 of the process for developing or updating your plan:

(1) decide what you want - your goals,

(2) figure out what you have,

(3) select your silviculture methods/practices,

(4) assess your financial and labor resources,

(5) develop a schedule, and

(6) keep good records.

Your Goals

Hopefully, you have a good idea about what you want from your forest. If not, there are some resources might help you to prioritize your goals - two books and one computer program. "The Woodland Steward" by James Fazio is a good general reference and starting point for forest landowners. "Woodland Stewardship" by the University of Minnesota addresses all six steps of the planning process as well as being a good general forestry reference. In addition, the Forest Stewardship Planning Guide is software that helps you determine and prioritize your goals as well as select applicable management practices. This software can be downloaded from the Internet at http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/burlington/index.htm

What You Have

Now, back to the skills you need to take charge of your plan. To figure out what species you have, of course you need to work on your tree identification skills - these are frequently offered by the Northwest Illinois Forestry Association, at the Tri-State Forest Stewardship Conference in March, and by the Illinois Tree Farm Committee.

Your Soils

To figure out your soils and sites just requires a bit of research - someone else has done most of the work for you. Visit your local NRCS office and ask for a copy of the county soil survey. If that is not available, then ask for a soil map for your land. Either of these will show the type and location of soils. The NRCS people should also give you information on your soils characteristics (this is included in the soil survey). You should study this information (even though this sounds like homework, it is your land).

If your land is not flat, you should overlay the slopes onto this map, at least mentally. As you look at the map and think of the slopes, keep in mind compass directions - certain trees do better on north and east aspects, others are more appropriate for south and west aspects. The soil survey will also indicate the percent of slope; if you're uncertain about this, ask NRCS.

Management Units

Now, you want to divide your land into management units - so that a set of management practices apply evenly within each unit (a unit can be one acre or more than 40 acres). A management unit will be distinct from your other units because of its tree species, the age of the stand, its slope or aspect or soil type, whether it is a plantation or a natural forest, or because you want to manage it differently from neighboring units.

This is a good time to walk your land with a copy of the map in hand. Mark the unit boundaries on the map and on the ground. For each unit, you will want to inventory the growing stock and volumes. These numbers will help you decide whether to thin or harvest, whether the species mix is what you want. If done periodically - every five or ten years - it also gives you a good idea of growth rate.

Controlling Disturbances

Logging, though one of the most important silvicultural tools available, causes stress in many ways. Three are worth highlighting: (1) by opening the canopy, changing light, and temperature levels; (2) by disturbing and compacting the forest soils when heavy equipment is used for extraction; and the most serious, (3) by causing wounds in the remaining trees, disrupting important physiological processes, and leaving them susceptible to decay and disease-causing organisms.

Other potentially negative effects from practices such as high-grading (take the best and leave the rest) reflect poor silviculture but often do not cause any more stress than logging to improve the stand. Stands with closed canopies (highly shaded conditions) that are opened by logging may experience a phenomenon known as thinning shock. Although it is not exactly clear why this happens, it may be that trees divert energy into crown growth to take advantage of openings at the expense of providing adequate nutrition to other parts of the tree.

Increased temperatures, light, and wind speeds are factors as well. Thinning shock by itself is not bad. Usually a stand recovers after a growing season or two. However, couple thinning shock with other stresses, and die-back and mortality will occur. Closed stands that have been defoliated recently, or are suffering from drought, should be opened only very gradually or not at all. The way to avoid thinning shock is to thin lightly, but often. Doing so, however, leads to the potential of increasing stress from other factors, namely soil compaction and wounds. By eliminating air spaces in the soil, and decreasing the rate of water percolation, soil compaction is a very serious side effect of harvesting.

Planning Can Reduce Stress Usually, 10 to 16 percent of a harvest area is devoted to roads, landings, and skid trails. Experts say that, with proper planning and good felling techniques, these areas could be reduced by 40 percent. Not only does good planning lessen the ecological impacts of logging, it makes timber extraction considerably easier and cheaper. For example, the best way to prevent soil compaction and root disturbances is to schedule harvesting during frozen-ground conditions. In any harvesting prescription - short of clear-cutting - wounding of the remaining trees is inevitable.

Even the most careful of felling techniques will cause some crown breakage, and stem wounding on remaining trees used as bumpers is difficult to avoid. Of greatest concern, however, is wounding of feeder roots. As indicated earlier, up to 80 percent of the total length of a tree's root system is made up of feeder (or fine) roots. They are mostly near the soil surface and are extremely susceptible to damage, especially during the growing season.

Careful with that Equipment!

Root and stem wounding has increased dramatically with the use of skidders and other mechanized harvesting equipment. Unfortunately, this equipment can compensate for a lack of user skill with power and there is always a tendency to oversize equipment at the expense of maneuverability. Any time the outside protective layer of a tree is broken, it creates an opening called an infection court. In response to wounding, trees have evolved a method of walling-off or isolating the injury. Badly scarred trees with full, healthy crowns standing next to a skid trail are not an uncommon site. These trees, however, will never recover the grade and wood loss due to the injury. Timber management is a process of weighing the benefits of a prescription against the negative effects of harvesting. In the epilogue to Principles of Silviculture (Daniels et al., 1979), the authors cite a German forester, Henrich Cotta, who wrote in 1816 his Advice on Silviculture:

"The good physician lets people die; the poor one kills them. With the same right one can say the good forester [landowner, logger, or others who make decisions about forest use] allows the most perfect forest to become less so; the poor one spoils them."

Logging is a double-edged sword. Regardless of the objective - be it for wildlife habitat, recreation, timber production, or a combination of uses - logging is the principal means of affecting and controlling change in the forest. It also has the potential to do great damage, some of which may be irreversible. Fortunately, most of the practices that lessen the negative impacts of logging are common sense.