The Forest Survey 
EPENDABLE information on the supply of all raw materials is vital to the conduct of the 
war and to the success of present efforts at post-war planning. This economic survey of an 
integral part of the Nation’s reservoir of raw material—our forests, and of the industries 
dependent upon them, is essential to a complete understanding of resource potentialities. The data 
presented result from the first Nation-wide field inventory ever to be made of the volume, quality, 
and species of the timber resource, undertaken primarily as an essential contribution to the national, 
social, and economic welfare in peacetime. The rapidly changing conditions of our economic and — 
social life since the second world war began have accentuated the need for publishing the facts already 
gathered and the conclusions to be drawn from them. 
The Nation-wide Forest Survey, authorized by the McSweeney-McNary Forest Research Act 
of May 22, 1928, has undertaken the task of obtaining facts essential to a system of planned forest — 
land management and use for each of the States and forest regions, and for the Nation, and through 
analysis thereof is aiding in the formulation of guiding principles and policies, fundamental to per- 
manent forest land use. 
The fivefold purpose of the Forest Survey is: (1) To make a field inventory of the present supply 
of timber and other forest products; (2) to ascertain the rate at which this supply is being increased 
through industrial and domestic uses, windfall, fire, disease, and other causes; (4) to determine the 
present consumption and the probable future trend in requirements for timber and other forest prod- 
ucts; and (5) to interpret and correlate these findings with existing and anticipated economic condi- — 
tions, as an aid in the formulation of both private and public policies for the effective and rational 
use of land suitable for forest production. 
The plan has been to publish the results of this investigation as they become available. Neces-  } 
sarily, the data here presented apply to large areas and should not be interpreted as portraying 
correctly the forest situation for small sections, the conditions of which may be either better or poorer 
than the average for the entire unit or State. They supply the general background for the intensive 
study of critical situations. Recommendations included in these reports are adapted to the long-time 
character of timber growing and presuppose normal peacetime conditions. Any that are out of line 
with war requirements are obviously in abeyance for the present. 
The survey is conducted in the various forest regions by the forest experiment stations of the 
Forest Service and in the South by the Southern Forest and Range Experiment Station with head- 
quarters in New Orleans, La. 
Raymonp D. Garver, 
Director, Forest Survey. 
