THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF WORKING PLANS 215 



Austria shows within its boundaries the greatest variety of 

 forest conditions.* All phases of vegetation are encountered 

 from the semi-tropical shores of the Adriatic grading through 

 the sandy and often rocky coastal plains, through the mount- 

 ing foothills to the dolomitic or archaic fastnesses of the Alps 

 and Carpathians, where all tree growth is dwarfed and even the 

 lower stands are constantly threatened with rock slides and 

 avalanches. The forest products vary accordingly from the 

 finest timbers with high rotations down to mere fuel woods with 

 the shortest of coppice rotations. Similarly, some forests are 

 in immediate proximity to dense centres of population — as, 

 e.g., the Wienerwald just outside the gates of Vienna — permitting 

 almost perfect utilization because of a voracious market; some 

 forests, on the other hand, are still virgin and as yet out of 

 profitable reach of the lumberman's axe. Gradually, though, 

 the increasing prices of timber are making accessible at a profit 

 even the stands most remote from centres of population, and 

 soon there will be no virgin forests in Austria. f 



Again, the task of forest management is, sometimes, as in 

 Salzburg, burdened by servitudes; elsewhere no such restric- 

 tions exist. As a result the market varies greatly, but in gen- 

 eral it is developing rapidly, especially in the export trade 

 to Germany and Italy and other European or Oriental coun- 

 tries. 



Eighty-five per cent of the Austrian timberlands are man- 

 aged as high forest, of which one-third is selection forest 

 mostly in the "high" protection zone of the Alps; 12 per 



* See " Methods of Natural Regeneration in Austria " and " Methods of 

 Artificial Regeneration in Austria," Articles VIII and IX, respectively, in the 

 series: " Some Aspects of European Forestrj'," F, Q., Vol. XI, No. 4, pp. 

 470-498, reprinted in 1913. 



t The Austrian government now constructs its own logging devices, sawmills, 

 railroads, chutes, flumes, etc.; these are used by the purchaser of the stumpage 

 for which use he pays a proportionately higher stumpage price. Formerly stump- 

 age was sold as in America, and the purchaser put in his own improvements; 

 as rapidly as possible these improvements were then bought up by the govern- 

 ment and paid for in cash or in timber. 



