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A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 



social customs and usages. The effects of these changing conditions 

 cannot be precisely foretold in terms of forest-land acreage. Of 

 primary importance, however, are such questions as the quality and 

 quantity of timber the forest lands will produce, whether these lands 

 will be more or less than adequate for the best interests of our people, 

 whether a national sufficiency will actually provide a regional suffici- 

 ency measured in terms of the forest products most needed, and to 

 what degree public or private ownership of timber-use lands is to 

 our best advantage. These and similar questions suggest the neces- 

 sity for careful consideration of our commercial forest-land areas in 

 the solution of many of the nation's major economic problems and in 

 the planning of programs of forest-land use. 



Table 2 and figure 3 show the distribution regionally of commercial 

 land bearing timber of different conditions of growth that of saw- 

 timber size, that of cordwood size, of smaller growth on fair to satis- 

 factory restocking areas, and, finally, the relatively unproductive 

 areas termed poor to nonrestocking. 2 



TABLE 2. Commercial forest area of the United States, by character of growth and 



region 



Commercial forest land is present in every major region of the 

 United States in such quantity as to be an important basic resource. 

 It will be shown in the section Present and Potential Timber Ke- 

 sources, however, that the populous and important wood-consuming 

 New England and Middle Atlantic regions apparently cannot be 

 wholly and permanently self-supporting as to timber supplies. 

 They are now and probably will continue to be partially dependent, 

 therefore, upon the South and West, a very favorable relationship 

 insofar as the encouragement of forestry in the latter two regions is 

 concerned. However, these interregional relationships account for 

 numerous complexities hi the formulation of regional and national 

 forest-land policies. 



Of outstanding significance, regionally and nationally, are the 

 forest-land resources of the Pacific Coast, because of their potentially 

 large timber-producing capacity and their enormous stands of virgin 

 timber; and those of the South because of the great area (39 percent 



2 Saw timber denotes areas characterized by trees large enough for sawlog production regardless of their 

 actual use. In recent years over 30 percent of the saw-timber cut has been used for other than lumber 

 manufacture. Cordwood denotes areas characterized by trees too small for saw logs but large enough for 

 cordwood use, regardless of whether the stand is cut for cordwood or held for saw timber. Good, fair, poor, 

 and nonrestocking refer to areas characterized by 70 percent or more, 40 to 69 percent, 10 to 39 percent, and 

 less than 10 percent, respectively, of normal stocking with trees for the most part below cordwood size. 



