A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 1309 



forestry and, like all other objectives in any positive form of manage- 

 ment, will not be reached without providing additional finances. 

 While the fire problem has been successfully met on many national 

 forests which require but little additional expenditures, there still 

 remain 30 million acres in the national forests where the situation is 

 critical and intensified protection effort is of paramount importance. 

 These areas represent the most accessible timber-growing sites, the 

 most valuable watersheds, and the most intensively used recreational 

 forests. On the present scale of protection these areas will retrograde, 

 but adequate funds can reverse the process. 



PROTECTION AGAINST INSECTS 



Protection against forest insects, as pointed out in other sections of 

 this report, must be provided not only for the normal year but also 

 for the years when attack becomes abnormally high. The proposed 

 expenditure for insect control is raised from 0.07 to 0.125 cent per 

 acre and is largely to be devoted to handling bark-beetle attacks in 

 the most valuable pine stands. A proposed $200,000 annual expendi- 

 ture doubles the present allotment for this work and will be merely 

 sufficient to hold in check the building up of epidemic attacks in the 

 commercial timber belts of ponderosa, sugar, white, and southern 

 pines, and lodgepole pine on the national forests. Further increases 

 will be needed if the less valuable stands of lodgepole pine are to be 

 protected or if endemic losses in any valuable species are to be entirely 

 curbed. Unusual epidemics are not predictable, but w T hen they do 

 occur, control work must be handled with dispatch. No provision is 

 made in these calculations for the control of abnormally high epidemics 

 of bark beetles or for serious attacks by new insect pests or for insects 

 whose work is only occasionally very destructive. Protection against 

 insects is set up as current annual charge. 



PROTECTION AGAINST TREE DISEASES 



Few tree fungous diseases are specifically treated in the national 

 forests at present but these are partially controlled as a result of other 

 activities. Disease induced by indigenous fungi generally spreads in 

 a forest stand after a fire and can be partially checked as fires are 

 successfully excluded by adequate protection. Cutting under silvi- 

 cultural methods and consequent stand betterment remove diseased 

 trees and thus reduce sources of further infection. These costs are 

 included under fire protection and timber management, but do not 

 appear in protection against disease. As sound silvicultural treat- 

 ment proceeds, each rotation should as a general rule find stands in 

 healthier condition and a checking of disease may be possible. For 

 example, in some of the western virgin stands the first cutting shows 

 averages of 10 to 25 percent cull, while in the second cut the cull will 

 be reduced to only 5 percent. 



It is otherwise, however, with exotic fungi. These once trans- 

 planted in a new environment, on a new host, may almost completely 

 exterminate a species. And this, in fact, is happening with the chest- 

 nut in the East. In the West, the white-pine blister rust, a virulent 

 and destructive disease of the five-needle pines, is reducing the valuable 

 white and sugar pine in both quantity and quality and may eliminate 



