What is Ahead for Intensive Pine Plantation Silviculture in the South?

TLDR

The southeastern United States is the world’s largest industrial timber producer, yet its plantations grow more slowly than many global counterparts, though rates above 10 t / acre yr are achievable and future improvements hinge on clonal plantations, whole‑rotation management, spectral monitoring, and targeted pest control. Value is optimized by planting elite seedlings on cleared, fertilized sites and then applying successive vegetation suppression, nutrient additions, thinning, and pruning to sustain the optimal number of high‑quality trees. Recognizing intensive silviculture as an agricultural system, the authors found that active management of both trees and soil can dramatically increase growth and value. South.

Abstract

Abstract The southeastern United States produces more industrial timber than any other region of the world from a forest base that includes almost one-half of the world's industrial forest plantations. Although current growth rates are substantially lower than in many other forest plantation areas in the world, growth rates exceeding 10 tons/acre/year are biologically possible and financially attractive in the region. Dramatic gains in growth and value became possible as we recognized that intensive plantation silviculture is like agriculture: Both the plant and the soil need to be actively managed to optimize value. Optimizing value starts with planting high-quality seedlings or plantlets from the best families of the right species to a site where competing vegetation has been suppressed and where the soil may have been tilled and/or fertilized to improve early tree growth. In most cases, these treatments will need to be followed by competing vegetation suppression, repeated nutrient additions, thinning, and pruning – treatments that provide needed resources to the appropriate number of quality crop trees. Several challenges remain to implement the silvicultural systems needed to fully realize the potential value of our plantations in a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable manner; however, looking into the future, we see clonal plantations, whole rotation resource management regimes, use of spatially explicit spectral reflectance data as a major information source, active management to minimize insect and disease losses, and more attention to growing wood for specific products. South. J. Appl. For. 29(2):62–69.