PROGRESS OF LAND CLASSIFICATION IN NAT'L FORESTS 9 



special Act of Congress and a number of additional areas added 

 by Presidential proclamation. 



The work of the boundary examination, which is in reality 

 one form of land classification, has undergone a very great 

 change during the last three or four years. The Act of August 

 10, 1912, appropriating funds for the Department of Agricul- 

 ture, carried for the first time, among its other provisions, a 

 fund for the classification and segregation of land in the Na- 

 tional Forests chiefly valuable for agricultural purposes. Suc- 

 cessive appropriation Acts increased this fund until it is now 

 uniformly one hundred thousand dollars a year. This money 

 is being expended for the purpose of making available for farm 

 use lands in the National Forests which are found to be suit- 

 able and chieflly valuable for that purpose. The work which 

 was inaugurated under this Act is of a more permanent and 

 final nature than the classification work carried on by the 

 boundary and settlement examinations already described. 

 Necessarily, boundary work can not deal with small interior 

 areas. Examinations based upon the applications of individual 

 land seekers must necessarily be widely scattered. But the 

 work of classification under the special appropriation for that 

 purpose has been thorough and systematic. Attention was 

 given first to projects which are most likely to yield a consid- 

 erable percentage of land suitable for farm purposes, but when 

 a project was once begun, ordinarily it was continued until 

 the entire area was covered, in order that there might be no 

 necessity of going over the area again in the future. 



The land classification work as now carried on within ex- 

 isting National Forests is conducted in two operations, one 

 supplemental to the other. The preliminary stage is known as 

 "extensive" classification work. In reality this is a classifica- 

 tion reconnaissance. It covers in a broad way, usually by units 

 of approximately a township in area, the lands which are very 

 apparently not chiefly valuable for agriculture. While the so- 

 called ' l extensive ' ' classification work does not deal intimately 

 with the various factors affecting each area in such a unit re- 

 port, it does deal conclusively with the non-listable character 

 of that land, for the reason that such reports do not attempt 

 to pass upon the final classification of any areas which are at 



