NOTES AND COMMENT 



A series of eleven papers constituting a symposium on the subject of 

 forest types has been pubhshed in the Proceedings of the Society of Amer- 

 ican Foresters (8: no. 1, April, 1913). 



The classification of public lands with respect to their forest cover and 

 their agricultural possibihties is bj^ no means a simple matter. Nearly 

 all of the shades of opinion regarding it are reflected in the symposium, in 

 the course of which it is not always clear whether the discussion con- 

 cerns the economic classification of land or the scientific classification of 

 forests. 



Those who are interested in the practical work of taking stock of the 

 present timber resources of the country are accustomed to use the term 

 forest type in the sense of a body of standing timber of definite composi- 

 tion. Those who are interested in silvicultural methods, however, use 

 forest type in the sense of a body of timber requiring definite physical 

 conditions and a uniform management. The "management type" of 

 the silviculturist is a selected or cultural aggregation of species and is not 

 always identical with the natural or "cover type" recognized in the 

 reconnaisance of virgin forests. The areal delimination of cover types 

 gives an ecological classification of forest areas, based on specific com- 

 position — an easy task which fulfills the practical needs of the present. 

 The silviculturist demands a physiological classification of forest areas 

 and an exact knowledge of physical conditions, a demand which pure bot- 

 any is not yet prepared to meet. If such knowledge were at hand it 

 would make it possible to develop the optimum forest crop for each region 

 and each topographic site without the delay and expense of empirical 

 methods. The fact that there is just as close a correlation between the 

 physical conditions and the cover types of the virgin forest as there can 

 be between the conditions and the management types, is sometimes lost 

 sight of in the symposium, although in this correlation is the only im- 

 mediate source of aid for the silviculturist. 



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