A SUMMARY OF THE TIMBER RESOURCE REVIEW 



73 



tivity, judgment in the development of the detailed 

 criteria for particular localities for each element, 

 and judgment in the system of compilation 

 adopted. There may be some who will feel the 

 standards were set too high. Others may feel 

 that the standards were too low. The Forest 

 Service believes the standards used were reason- 

 able when it is borne in mind that the objective 

 was to relate productivity of cutover areas to a 

 standard of what is currently attainable on the 

 average under practical management, and that a 

 100-percent rating would mean only that forest 

 conditions met or exceeded that standard. 



There are numerous ways in which the produc- 

 tivity standards could be raised or lowered. For 

 example, standards would be raised: 



(1) If standards were geared to medium pro- 

 jected timber demand or highly intensive forest 

 practices. 



(2) If a felling age higher than that of maximum 

 mean annual growth were adopted in order to 

 recognize the need for growing quality wood. 



(3) If a felling age were recognized only for 

 sawtimber rather than for either growing stock or 

 sawtimber depending on whether the cutting was 

 for small or large products. 



(4) If standards of composition had been higher. 



(5) If higher standards of both existing and 

 prospective stocking had been adopted. The 

 stocking standards were frequently exceeded on 

 properties under management. 



On the other hand, productivity standards could 

 be lowered by adjustments in the opposite direc- 

 tion. In view of the magnitude of the estimates 

 of projected timber demand, there would be little 

 justification for lowered standards. 



The productivity ratings could have been 

 grouped into more than three broad classes. 

 Under the system adopted, operating areas with 

 an index of 70 are grouped in the same class as 

 those with an index of 95, and those with an index 

 of 10 are grouped with those with an index of 30. 

 More class groupings would have resulted in 

 greater selectivity. For example, if the limits of 

 the upper class had been 80 to 100 rather than 70 

 to 100, the proportion of recently cut lands in that 

 class would have been 48 instead of 65 percent. 



Productivity Varies by Ownership, Lo- 

 cation, Forest Type, and Kind of 

 Cutting 



In summarizing such a complex survey, the mass 

 of available statistics can readily obscure the main 

 conclusions. For example, nearly 26 thousand 

 individual ownerships were examined and each 

 operating area of this group involved the individual 

 examination of 4 to 30 plots, or 10 to 60 examina- 

 tion points. Furthermore, productivity as eval- 



uated in this survey varies according to such 

 factors as size of ownership, kind of ownership, 

 forest, region or section, and forest type. To be 

 of value, it is necessary to examine the relationship 

 of cutover forest condition to each of these various 

 factors individually and in combination. 



Results are expressed in terms of the proportion 

 of operating area in each of three broad produc- 

 tivity classes. Because the operating area of the 

 entire country totaled 235 million acres at the 

 time of this survey, or nearly one-half of the com- 

 mercial forest land area of the United States, the 

 grouping of operating areas into productivity 

 classes is considered representative of the owner- 

 ship, section, or forest tj^pe in which the operating 

 area occurred. 



The overall results of the survey show that 65 

 percent of the operating area of 235 million acres 

 qualified for the upper productivity class, 24 

 percent for the medium class, and 11 percent in 

 the lower class (table 46 and fig. 35). 



By major ownership groups, it is apparent that 

 public and forest industry ownerships have about 

 the same proportion of their operating areas in 

 the upper class with 80 and 77 percent, respec- 

 tively. On the other hand, farm and "other" 

 private ownerships, with about the same operating 

 area as public ownerships, but much larger com- 

 mercial forest land area, have 46 percent in the 

 upper productivity class. Over 50 percent of the 

 farm and "other" private operating area is in the 

 lower or medium classes (fig. 36). 



includes Coastal Alaska 



Figure 35 



