Silvicultural Treatment Opportunities by Timberland Quality Class 



Forest managers usually consider a stand's potential economic return 

 before applying silvicultural treatments. Potential productivity and operabil- 

 ity of the land are important factors in determining the possible economic 

 return realized from forest management activities. Therefore, a table that 

 estimates acreage by timberland quality class and treatment opportunity class 

 can be helpful by showing how many acres are likely to be economical to 

 treat. Obviously, timber management funds are more likely to be spent on 

 timberlands rated as good or excellent than on timberlands of lesser quality. 

 The amounts of land in the different timberland quality classes that were 

 assigned to the different treatment opportunities are shown in Tables 31 and 

 32. These acreages are shown for the working circle as a whole, as well as 

 for the different ownership groups. 



In Working Circle 3, the treatment opportunity with the largest amount 

 of good or excellent quality timberland at the time of measurement was har- 

 vest - low risk. This treatment opportunity existed on 90,900 acres of these 

 more productive lands. The category with the second highest amount of 

 acreage was harvest - high risk (codes 10 and 14) with 72,200 acres. 



As shown in Table 31, large amounts of high quality timberland also fell 

 into four other treatment opportunity categories: 



30 - No treatment due to productive condition (65,900 acres) 



20 - Precommercial thinning (38,400 acres) 

 13 - Overstory removal (32,600 acres) 



21 - Stand conversion (27,700 acres) 



Another way to view treatment opportunities is to break the combined 

 treatment codes into their component treatment codes and assign each code 

 the total acreage figure. For example, if 10,000 acres are assigned the "13, 

 20 - overstory removal and precommercial thinning" combined treatment code, 

 then 10,000 acres present opportunities for overstory removal and 10,000 

 acres present opportunities for precommercial thinning. By adding the acre- 

 ages assigned to the individual codes it is possible to determine the amount of 

 land offering opportunities for each type of treatment. Table 32 shows the 

 total number of acres assigned to each treatment opportunity class. The tab- 



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