NOTES 607 



are getting scarce, there is enough of the virgin supply of this tree in 

 western Oregon and Washington to meet the world's needs for this 

 medicine for many years to come. However, the necessity to peel 

 from smaller, more inaccessible and more scattered trees, will tend to 

 raise the value of the product. The fact that much of the optimum 

 habitat of this species is agricultural land and is being so developed, 

 means that some stands will not be reproduced and that there will 

 result an actual diminution of the acreage of ultimate cascara land. 



In Forest Service sales of cascara bark stumpage simple require- 

 ments are enforced which aim to secure replacement and close utiliza- 

 tion of the species. Stumps must be less than 6 inches high, cut smooth. 

 and not peeled, to promote sprouting. Limbs down to 2 inches diam- 

 eter must be peeled, and the tops lopped. Sprouting of the cut stumps 

 is quite satisfactory, particularly with the earliest spring cuttings. Al- 

 ready some of the old cuttings on private lands are yielding sprouts 

 large enough to peel. 



Thornton T. Hunger. 



A Commercial and Silvicae Tree Study of Sitka Spruce Begun 



The operations of the Spruce Production Division of the War De- 

 partment in the Sitka spruce belt of the Pacific Coast have furnished 

 an excellent opportunity to study Sitka spruce. Hitherto there has 

 been so little cutting of this minority species that in any one camp it 

 was difficult to get enough trees for measurement. Now there are 

 thousands of acres of freshly cut stumps available for analysis and 

 in places millions of feet of logs bucked and left where felled when 

 the operations were abandoned last fall. A small party of silvical 

 research men from the Oregon and Washington District of the Forest 

 Service has therefore been put in the field to study representative tracts 

 of spruce in the coastal regions of those States, under the direction of 

 Forest Assistant N. L. Cary, who has just been mustered out of the 

 Spruce Production Division. 



The amount of scientific information about the species is singularly 

 meager and an almost virgin field is open to investigation. Aside from 

 gathering the conventional data on silvical characteristics, and stand 

 and tree measurements, an effort will be made to assemble and record 

 the information which has resulted from the lumbering activities of 

 the aircraft spruce production campaign. 



In the past two years a great deal of cruising has been done by 

 the War Department, and, in connection with the logging and milling 



