A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 797 



EXPENDITURES FOR STATE FOREST RESEARCH 



Anything like an exact statement of the present expenditures for 

 State forest research is impossible. In the section State Aid to 

 Private Owners and Local Political Units an incomplete showing for 

 the fiscal year 1932 reached a total of not quite $176,000. This 

 showing was based partly on specific data and partly on estimates. 

 The latest statistics of annual expenditures by the State forestry 

 departments variously reported for the years 1931 and 1932 show 

 an aggregate expense of $97,855 for research. It seems not unreason- 

 able to estimate the forest research expenditures of the forestry and 

 other departments of State universities and agricultural colleges at 

 $165,000. This, of course, does not include the expenditures by 

 privately endowed institutions, discussed in the section Privately 

 Supported and Quasi-Public Forest Research. 



The data presented in the section State Aid to Private Owners and 

 Local Political Units showed only one expenditure by an agricultural 

 experiment station, amounting to $8,000. The listed projects of the 

 stations, however, evidence a rather widespread activity in various 

 lines of forest research. Collectively, the agricultural experiment 

 stations appear to have spent on research projects in forestry about 

 $14,000 of Federal funds received under the provisions of the Hatch, 

 Adams, and Purnell Laws. Including this $14,000 the experiment 

 stations probably devoted to research projects that fall within the 

 field of forestry or correlate with Federal forestry investigations 

 about $55,000, exclusive of $75,000 for range research in the West. 



In addition the States contribute to various activities that involve 

 research or relate closely to it. Expenditures totaling some $50,500 

 in 1932 by the Pacific Coast and Lake States for economic survey work 

 on forest land fall in this class. The amounts spent in the different 

 sections of the United States are given in the section on State aid 

 referred to above. 



The aggregate expenditure by all State agencies is thus somewhere 

 in the neighborhood of $443,000, of which about $14,000 is supplied 

 by Federal grants. 



Divided as these various classes of research expenditure are among 

 many States, the sums are inconsequential and entirely dispropor- 

 tionate to the size and importance of the forest problems confronted 

 in most cases. The funds allocated to research by the State forestry 

 or conservation departments, including those for economic forest 

 land surveys, amount to only about 2 percent of the aggregate appro- 

 priations to these departments. 



CONCLUSIONS 



State forest research should in the main complement that of the 

 Federal Government though dealing primarily with problems of 

 special importance to individual States. This is particularly true 

 for the State forestry departments, few of which are equipped to 

 engage in research on a major scale. Their investigations are at 

 present limited for the most part to the solution of exigency problems 

 arising in the course of other activities, but their needs will necessitate 

 the provision of increased facilities, either of their own or provided 

 by other State research agencies. 



The forest schools of the State agricultural colleges and State 

 universities are in a position to meet both State and Federal needs for 



