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Compass issue 13
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Compass is a quarterly publication of the USDA Forest Service's Southern Research Station (SRS). As part of the Nation's largest forestry research organization -- USDA Forest Service Research and Development -- SRS serves 13 Southern States and beyond. The Station's 130 scienists work in more than 20 units located across the region at Federal laboratories, universites, and experimental forests.



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Issue 13

The Crossett

Regrowth starts in the West

by Jim Guldin

Since its establishment in 1934, the Crossett Experimental Forest (Crossett) has been the repository of silvicultural alternatives to the intensive plantation methods that dominate industrial forestry on the Coastal Plain. The hidden secret of southern forestry is that Coastal Plain loblolly-shortleaf pine is the Nation’s most pliable forest type, able to be sustainably managed using even-aged and uneven-aged silvicultural systems that rely on natural regeneration— methods that find tremendous interest on private family forest lands as well as public lands. There’s no better place in the South to see this variety of successful practice than the Crossett, venerated for its role as a field laboratory and demonstration site for good forest management.

The Crossett Lumber Company, later acquired by Georgia-Pacific, originally deeded the land to the Southern Forest Experiment Station (now SRS) in a 50-year agreement that committed the Station to return an amount of timber equal to what was present on the forest at the time of the agreement. Crossett founder Russ Reynolds succeeded in delivering on the Station’s commitment and in leaving the forest better stocked than it was at the time of the take over. With the rise of interest in plantation forestry in the 1960s, the work at Crossett was thought for a while to be out of date. But time has shown the wisdom behind the silvicultural tactics at Crossett—they provide foresters with the diversity of management tools needed to meet the diversity of forest ownership goals in the 21st century.

 

(More...)

Since those early days, the Crossett has been without peer as a research and demonstration forest, with visitors numbering in the thousands over the past five decades. Foresters, landowners, students, and teachers have visited the Farm Forestry Forty Demonstration Area to learn about the selection method in southern pines in stands that have now been managed using that method for seven decades. These outreach efforts have also been instrumental in helping southern national forests move away from intensive plantations and toward management that relies on natural regeneration, and that maintains continuous forest cover.

The Crossett staff maintains additional research studies that demonstrate different even-aged and uneven-aged cutting methods that rely on natural regeneration, rehabilitation of understocked stands, development of tools to create managed old-growth stands, as well as the use of prescribed burning to control competing vegetation. The 80-acre Reynolds Research Natural Area is used to study the ecology of stand development in the absence of management.

Each spring the Crossett staff sponsors a Forestry Field Day to help foresters and private landowners learn about cutting-edge research and technological developments designed to improve low-cost natural stand management. In addition, Crossett scientists are responsible for the southern pine module of the National Advanced Silviculture Program, whereby Forest Service field foresters are certified for silvicultural decisions. These science delivery activities are typically cosponsored by the Arkansas Forestry Commission, the Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, and the School of Forest Resources at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

 

 





The silvicultural tactics developed at the Crossett provide foresters with the diversity of management tools needed to meet the diversity of ownership goals of the 21st century. (Forest Service photo)
The silvicultural tactics developed at the Crossett provide foresters with the diversity of management tools needed to meet the diversity of ownership goals of the 21st century. (Forest Service photo)