244 Forestry Quarterly 



Improvement Plan. Tentative plans will be made on a more 

 comprehensive basis, so that the total of probable construction 

 may be under consideration for many years in advance. On the 

 basis of the earlier work and its costs and values, the revision 

 of the Plan proceeds from year to year, properly being recorded 

 by maps and written reports, so as to insure that full record 

 of the information available, and the notions of the forester 

 currently in charge, may be available at all subsequent times. 



On many of our American forests which have been under 

 administration for some time, especially the better administered 

 of the National Forests, this status of affairs has been reached, 

 and as a rule, the individual improvement projects undertaken 

 and completed have been well conceived and executed. In many 

 cases, however, specific construction has been done without any 

 adequate data and without the intelligent formulation of any- 

 thing resembling an idea as to what the final system will be like. 

 It is to be expected that there will be a generous number of 

 poorly conceived and poorly constructed projects until the body 

 of technical improvement information available to foresters, is 

 much greater than it is at present. Probably the most com- 

 mon error is failure to foresee improvement needs far enough 

 in advance. Permanently beneficial projects have been too often 

 subordinated to current and petty administrative conveniences, 

 as in the case of too-good Ranger station buildings built on short- 

 life timber sales. 



What will the improvement system on an average American 

 forest be like in twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years? What will 

 it have cost? What will it be worth? How shall the forester 

 budget his improvement expenses between protection, utilization 

 and administration? What will the ratio between first cost and 

 maintenance charges be? On what calculations shall the forester 

 proceed to justify large initial improvement investments before 

 the forest is on a fully self-supporting basis? Questions such 

 as these must shortly be considered, rather than such questions 

 as : Had we better tackle the Bearskull cut-ofif before we equip 

 the Moletree lookout? Did Thompson get the minimum possible 

 grade on that location? Would it be better to build the Hasty 

 station with three rooms or two, and shall it have a well or can 

 we pipe the water down from that seep? 



