The Co-op Correspondent

The Newsletter of the Stand Management Cooperative

1ST Quarter 1999, CFR University of Washington

 

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From the Director, David Briggs

By the time you receive this issue, the SMC Spring Meeting of TAC’s and the Policy Committee will have concluded and I want to thank all who participated. A summary will be in the next issue of the SMC Quarterly.

 During the past quarter, we also submitted the proposal to the AGENDA 2020 Sustainable Forestry Research Area on March 1. The proposal requests $430,000 to create 16 Douglas-fir and 8 western hemlock installations for the long-term study of the interactions of genetics, silviculture, and wood quality. With in-kind matching support from the industry for planning and site preparation, planting and early vegetation control, the total budget was estimated to be $710,00. According to the timetable for review of these proposals, we should know if this proposal was selected as a finalist by April 5. If we are among the finalists, then we will need to finalize the budget, cost share commitments, and other details by May 3. The next Annual Policy Committee will be held on September 23-24, 1999. The location is scheduled to be in British Columbia. We are working on details that will be announced later.

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Articles in This Issue

This issue contains three articles. The first one is the Carryover Effects of Nitrogen Fertilization on Douglas-Fir Stands. The aim of this study is to provide a better understanding of the long term implications of Nitrogen fertilization of forest plantations on subsequent stand growth. The specific objectives of the study are to determine: 1) whether N-fertilization increases the growth of subsequent stands, and after harvesting, and 2) any beneficial or antagonistic secondary effects of N-fertilization. The other report, Growth of Immature, Spaced and Fertilized Douglas-Fir Stands: Second Measurement Results, summarizes four-year (first growth period) results of auxiliary-fertilized treatment regimes set up in the Stand Management Co-op (SMC) Silviculture Project Type I installations. Type I installations are well-established juvenile stands that have not experienced substantial inter-tree competition. The last article is, Effects of N fertilization on Instantaneous Carbon Fixation Ability of Douglas-Fir Foliage: Relative Importance of Leaf Area and Photosynthetic Rate, by Thomas M. Hinckley, Zuo Shen, and Holly Barnard. This paper investigates how nitrogen-mediated response might lead to increases in productivity. The objective of the research was to examine the relative contribution of increased leaf area and increased photosynthetic rates on leaf carbon balance caused by nitrogen fertilization in different canopy positions and among different leaf age classes.

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Field Notes

Despite being the wettest winter in 40 years, and potentially the highest totals ever recorded for rain and snowfall in the Pacific Northwest, the SMC field crew is coping with the conditions and will finish all remeasurements by March 15 on schedule. So what is next?

As soon as all remeasurements are completed the field crew will install plots in two new Type III plantations. We have been doing two installations a year since 1995 and have just a couple more years of this until all Type III plantations have plots. This year’s installations are in the Skagit Valley and the Kitsap Peninsula.

The field crew will also install additional plots (Type IIIpa’s) in three Type III installations. These plots will be pruned or thinned according to the study plan and initial measurements will be taken.

Once the pruning is completed on this year’s Type I installations (six installations, eighteen plots) the crew will return to take bole “form”
measurements.

All this work must be completed by the start of the growing season. We sure could use some sunshine!

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Database Update

The 1998-1999 field season has proceeded quite well so far. A total of 52 installations will be visited this season for plot measurements and / or thinning trigger checks. At this point all of the plots that were nearing their thinning triggers have been visited and of those, a total of eight plots have been marked for thinning. The plots are distributed as follows: three in British Columbia, one in Oregon, and four in Washington. Of the plots that are scheduled for thinning, three plots in two installations were visited before the thinning crews got to them and a total of 23 trees were destructively sampled. All the stem sectioning data has been brought on line. This brings the database of stem sectioning data up to a total count of 334 trees.

Data loading awaits the completion of all sampling work on an installation. At this writing, field work on 25 installations has been completed and the data from 20 of those installations have been brought on line.

The remaining backlog of data entry from the discontinued crown study has been reduced by a third and the remainder of the data is expected to be brought on line by early April.

Database software and the current design of the present database will be evaluated over the month of May as the current system has reached the end of its lifecycle. Once the data collected from this season is on line, the database staff will be working to identify the best combination of software, database structure, and hardware in terms of functunality and cost for the cooperative. The tentative date for having the upgrade completed is September 3, 1999.

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The Stand Management Cooperative Home Page is provided by the College of Forest Resources. To find the contact you need, please check the Members or contact David Briggs, SMC Director, or Megan O'Shea, SMC Program Manager, SMC Cooperative, University of Washington Box 352100 Seattle, WA 98195, 206-206.543.1581. © 2000-2001, University of Washington, Stand Management Cooperative, including all photographs and images unless otherwise noted.

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