A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 



187 



Of the publicly owned or managed saw timber 552 billion board 

 feet or 81 percent is included in the national forests, 41 billion is 

 involved in the Oregon and California land grants, and about 32 

 billion board feet is administered by the Indian Service. States, 

 counties, and municipalities together hold 42 billion board feet, of 

 which the portion held by counties and municipalities is less than half a 

 billion board feet. 



There is a dearth of publicly owned or managed saw timber in the 

 East, where it amounts to only 11 out of 680 billion board feet. This 

 in itself emphasizes the desirability of considering an expanded pro- 

 gram of public forest and forest land ownership in the East. 



An examination of the details as to relative saw-timber stand condi- 

 tions for the different ownerships emphasizes again that the national 

 situation is a complex of widely varying regional conditions, each so 

 much affected by peculiar local factors that it is unsafe to go very far 

 in drawing general conclusions. Table 8 shows the stand per acre on 

 an ownership basis for groups of regions within which conditions are 

 roughly comparable. Not only are the stands for the Pacific Coast 

 much heavier in general than the average for the rest of the country 

 but they are much heavier than those of any other single region. 

 Within the Pacific Coast region the industrially owned old-growth is 

 more than twice as heavy per acre as that on farm woodlands and 

 publicly owned. This emphasizes again the fact that industrial 

 ownership, by and large, includes the best of the saw timber. 



TABLE 8. Average stand of saw timber per acre, by class of ownership, region, 



and character of growth 



1 North and South Rocky Mountains. 



2 New England, Middle Atlantic, Lake, Central, and South. 



The relatively low averages for farm woodland are doubtless in 

 part due to the very small proportion of old growth as well as to the 

 typically more selective character of the farm woodland saw timber 

 resulting from partial cutting at shorter intervals. 



