1558 A NATIONAL PLAN FOB AMERICAN FORESTRY 



so far obtained have added greatly to the assurance of results from 

 efforts to grow and manage timber. 



Although a substantial fund of knowledge on various forest- 

 management subjects has accumulated for different regions and 

 different forest types, an extremely large field of work remains to be 

 covered. In many important forest types, work along some of these 

 lines has made only slight progress, if any. In the subject of natural 

 reforestation much fundamental work remains to be done, and the 

 problem of carrying established stands through to maturity is, in 

 general, still in a preliminary, empirical stage. 



Research in artificial reforestation has made good progress, but 

 the gaps in our information on this subject are still large. The work 

 thus far has been almost entirely on conifers; how to establish plan- 

 tations successfully has yet to be determined for most hardwood 

 species and types. In the field of forest mensuration, volume tables 

 and yield tables for even-aged stands have been made for many 

 species and types, and these have proved very useful; but only a 

 little has yet been done on the fundamental laws governing the form 

 of trees, or their growth, or the yield of uneven-aged stands. Quality 

 of product, as contrasted with quantity, has received practically no 

 consideration in either volume or yield research. 



The urgent need for better and more extensive protection of forests 

 from fire has directed research effort into this field, but so much 

 remains ahead that what has been done is only a beginning. Marked 

 progress has been made in developing a technique for determining the 

 efficiency of protective organizations through statistical studies of 

 their fire records. Some studies have been made of the conditions 

 that influence fire behavior. These subjects, however, require a 

 great deal of further investigation, and others have scarcely been 

 touched. For example, while studies of fire damage have yielded 

 promising initial results, little progress has been made in any forest 

 type or region in finding methods for determining with any certainty 

 the damage caused by fire. Such information is extremely important 

 in all forest types as a primary means of determining direct and 

 indirect loss from fire, justifiable expenditures in forest fire protection, 

 and the silvicultural measures made necessary as a result of damage. 

 Research on the silvicultural use of fire lies almost entirely ahead, as 

 well as research on the possibility of reducing the menace of fire 

 through silvicultural management. 



Numerous fields of forest-management research as yet have hardly 

 been touched. Among these are forest regulation, or the systematic 

 chronological adjustment of forest yields on the basis of growth rate, 

 types of product, and other considerations affecting efficiency in 

 timber production and supplying data for financial planning; engineer- 

 ing problems concerned with permanent road or other transportation 

 systems and road and trail systems for fire protection; problems con- 

 nected with park forestry, or with the growth and health of shade and 

 ornamental trees; and the improvement of trees by selection and 

 crossbreeding. 



Progress of research in all these lines and this applies generally 

 to most of the Forest Service research subjects discussed later has 

 shown the need for more and more intensification of effort. In fact, 

 the chief present requirement of most forest research is the breaking 

 down of broad subjects into smaller component problems susceptible 



