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Habitat Management Scenarios

BY H MICHAEL HRUSCHEH.JOHN E. SPERRMRN JR.,C, PRESTON FOUT. ROBERT H IGILES JR. RN0 MRRK J. TWERY

, s owners and managers of forestlands, you are being challenged a>

never before to produce an increasingly complex set of benefits as a

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variety of costs increase Getting the most money from your forest-

land through timber harvesting is, by itself, a veq challenging goal.

But a growing number of private landowners want much more than mon-

ey from their Tree Farms. You may want to create or maintain certain desirable

ecological conditions such as a grove of “old-growth” trees or a scenic, park

like environment. You may want to restore portions of your property to more

natural conditions in order to enhance a diverse animal habitat well into the

future.

There is no simple answer to what is right, proper and best for ourselves

and for the land in our care. There is, however, a process-called the NED

Decision Support System -that can be followed to ensure that:

l All relevant goals are considered;

- The character of the forestland and its current condition is known;

C.Timber and Hunt ing Scenar io

Figure 1: Computer models allow the forest manager to predictthe results of different management options.

Deer Hill Tree Farm can best be de-scribed as a family farm in rl spur&man’sparadise. It has bew a familp-operatedfarm for more than 50 yeari, first by thelate T. Vaughan Ligon and then by MaryRebecca (Ligon) and her husband, John E.Spcarman Jr. Under the careiui 5tcward-ihip of Mr. Ligon, Deer Hill xvas mana@to provide diversif ied income. About 500acres rvere managed as a traditional rowcrop and livestock operation and the i’e-main+ 500 acrs were devoted to timberand rvildlife pmdu&n.

In I Y8Y things changed dramatically.Hurricane Hugo devastated virtually theentire acreage of maiure pine timber thathad hccn so carehxlly nurtired. This cata-strophic natural event along wide the long-term dcclix in traditional farm income,prompted the f,anilv to convert from m~v-crop fanning to Tree Farm@

placed into the Conseruatiion Reserve Pro-gram (CRI’) and planted to lohlolly pine.Wherwer possible, large, mast-producinghardwoods \\pre retained to provide toadfor wildlife.

These aggressive mana.gement practiceshave set Deer Hill Tree Farm hi-mlv on theroad to regaining financial prof;tahilit>o\‘er the long term. The\ have also carncdthe Spcarman family local and statewiderecognition, first ai the 51th Carolina Dis-trict 7 Tree Farm of the Year for 1993 and,mm recently as the South Carol ina Sta te~Trce Fam- for 1999.

Flald Testing the Technologyhi 2000 the Deer Hill Tree Farm was en-rol led in the USDA Forcsi Swvce’s tech-nology transfer pqram as a cake s tudy iofield ieit the NED systw~

The purpose of modem forcsi manage-mcnt is 10 achieve diverse goals defined forthe pmpcq by the Iandoi\ner. It cannot heo\ rremphniired that rvithout goals, WPicirirl management cannot he practiced.

SurpriGnglp idcnhising and choosing

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Figure 2: By comparing the outcomes of different management scenarios, you canchoose the right management plan to meet your goals.

a good 5et ot goals is the most difficult partof the entire decision process. One chal-lenge m choosing suitable goals i5 that youhwe to be able to tell whether you hawachieved them.

For example, one of the go.45 for DeerHill \~as to focus on producq wild turkeyhabitat. Well, you can’t just walk into theforest, pull out your wild-turkey-habitatmeasurement gauge, saving i t around andget a reading on it . There is, of course, nosuch gduge and that’s because wild turke,habitat is an abstract concept that unifi&many factors about the birds and theirneeds. So how do we measure it? CW, firstwe hare to further define what we meanby >vild turkey habi tat .

We talked with tirkev management ex-perts and decided that- iye needed threethings for good turkey popula t ions : (I) afavorable landscape pattern, (2) forcitlmdwith a l l 5ires of trees represented and (3)turkey food That list certaini!, helps, butwe are still not able to go out and measurecm! one of these three general cuncepts. SOwhat do ivc do? WC define what P,YJ meanby each of the three subdi\i5ions.

With that method, a fa\,orable Ian&xape pattern for turkey ii defined ax(1) park-like, upen forests cowrmg atleast 80 percent of the area, (2) scatteredsmall fields making up more than 10percent of the ared, (3) park-like largehardhood forests present near small

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fields, and (4) parh-like large pineforests covering at least 10 percent ofthe area. So noi\: finally, we have some-thing specitic we can measure in ourforests. Hy going through this process,ii-e create a list of goals in qwnce withunmeasurable but \-&able top-lewlgoals at one end and mc,xurable condi-tions that define the top-level goals atthe other end of the hierarchy.

Having deimed our goals, we nextneed to learn about our property. Mostprivate landownrrs du not possess aninventory of the trees on their land andhax~ only a general idea of the mix ofwgetation, soil and topographic fea-tures on their land. Few of them ha cmapped out their units of managementsuch as fields, pastures, young oakforests, old pine forests, etc., so that e’spossible to know how much area eachunit occupies and what i ts average char-dcterlstlcs are.

FortunateI!: the forestry coniulinntfor Deer Hill, Preston Fout of Shaw,McLeod, Belier, and Hurlbutt Inc. ofSumter, South Carolina, had a digitiredforest stand map available in the Arc-View GIS format. (For more on GIS andArcV~ew applications, see story on page38). An aerial photograph of Deer Hilltaken one year followng FlurricaneHugo was also available. These aids tolearmng dbuut the Derr Hill property

Dbtammg an lnuentoryObtaining an inventory is an expunsi\tsproposition and it’s a cost that must IXpaid for at the ye? beginning of serious ef-for ts to es tabl ish rl cost effectire manage-ment proqam. Knowing this, the ,UEDteam dex,eloped a relatw4y inexpaw\cand yet quite complete inventory proce-dure that prwidrs good estimates of ihelarge trees, the smaller trees, shrubs andherbs, and ~IOM.S for a rapid assessment ofwildl i fe habi tat cundihons using measuressuch a the presence or absence of deadstanding and dead f&n twzs. We look iorperches fur birds, whether moh5, ferns orgrasses COYC the ground, whether there i ipermanent water awilable for all cr~atureiand especiall~~ salanandrrs and turtlei,and so 011.

Al though ~?e look for many things, IWhare designed a process that takes app~~x-imately half an hour per forest and. VWHill contdim 35 units of mCmagrmeni COY-cring about 1,000 acres; 2R forest stand5and seven non-fore areas 5uch ‘~5 fields,house sites and a pond. wz were able toput one KED irwentoq plot in each of the2X forest st‘mds in four dayi. Granted, oneplot per stand heems small, but it wa af-fordable and i t provided a afticlently ac-curate dcscriptiun of each forcst s tand tosupport the NED de&ion prucrs~.

Deslgnmg Management ScenariosGi\en the set of goal5 and an undcista~d-ing of the current forest conditions we cianturn our dtkntion to @ring out r&t wemight do to our land (if anvthmg) so that itcan better achiwe the goals. WC i~,?nt to

create a small number of very differentstrategies for managing our land while sat-isfying the goals.

These strategies are called managementscenarios (Fig. 1, see page 7). Each is a dif-ferent road to get to the same place. In sus-tainable forest management there is rarelya s ingle, best road to fol low to achieve agiven set of goals. What we can do is de-sign several different ways (roads) to get toour goals, and then compare them. At eachcycle through this process, we learn moreabout our own values and goals, about ourland and about the things we can do withit. For Deer Hill, we designed three man-agement scenarios:

A) Timber Only Scenario: Maximumprofit from timber operations consistentonly with Best Management Practices(BMPs) for sustainable timber manage-ment and the CRP requirements. Wildlifeis not specifically addressed and no rev-enue from wildlife operations is expected.All open areas wil l be planted to loblol lypine, the pine-hardwood stands will becommercially chipped and converted toloblol ly pine plantat ions as soon as feasi -ble, loblolly pine plantations will have two&innings (ages lo-12 and 20-25) and a finalharvest at age 30-40, and the plantationsize-class distribution will be spread out toget a more even flow of income.

B) Timber and Extra Products Sce-nario: Maximum profit from non-tim-ber, non-extractive human use of theland. Leave 400 acres of existing pineplantations alone and continue to man-age for maximum timber. Take 100 acresof pine plantation and manage for bigpine over long rotations. The pine-hard-wood stands will be turned into parksavannahs with large hardwood treesspread out over a 30-by-30-foot grid. Is-lands of regenerating hardwoods willbe created in these open forests. Wildlifefood plots wil l be establ ished in a l l openfields and the wildlife row-crop plant-ing (corn) will continue. Many camping,nature education, hunting and othersporting activities will be developed toproduce income. A full description ofthe related “Lasting Forests” scenariocan be found on the Internet a t<www.LastingForests.com>.

C) Timber and Hunting Scenario: Max-imum profit from timber and hunting op-erations. Leave all pine plantations as theyare and manage for maximum production.Rent hunting rights to highest bidder. Thinpine-hardwood and hardwood stands topromote acorn production. Keep openfields open and food plots productive.

Having developed the three alternativemanagement scenarios for Deer Hill, wehad to pretend to carry each of them outover our 40-year t imeframe and then com-pare them to each other. We did this by us-ing a forest growth forecasting softwareprogram cal led the Forest Vegetat ion Sim-ulator (FVS). FVS was created and is main-tained by the USDA Forest Service forestmanagement service center in Ft . Coll ins,Colorado. This system covers all foresttypes in the United States. It can be ob-tained free of charge. It is, however, fairlycomplicated to use and requires a one-week training session before users feelcomfortable with the software. NED inte-grates FVS, but only for regions east of theMississippi. FVS is available on the Inter-net for downloading, free of charge, at<www.fs.fed.us/fmso.

Comparing Goals to Future ForestsTo recap: We set our goals; learned aboutthe current condit ion of our property; f ig-ured out some alternative ways we couldmanage our land; and projected those al-ternatives over a 4O-year horizon to f igurean estimate of how the forest is likely tolook for each scenario 40 years in the fu-ture. Now we can go back to our goals,find our measurable condit ions and evalu-ate them against each of our simulated fu-ture forests (Fig. 2, see page 8).

For example, in the wild turkey habi-tat goal, we needed park-like hardwoodforests with large trees near small fields.By evaluating the three simulated sce-narios, we can determine that only theTimber and Extra Products Scenario (B)will provide us with that condition.Mast-producing oak forests , on the oth-er hand, are found in both the Timberand Extra Products Scenario (B) and theTimber and Hunting Scenario (C). Com-parisons were continued for each of the

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?-ree h’tner MAY/JUNE 200 I

High-Tech Turkeycontinuedfiom page 9measured conditions. It is then a simplematter to rate each scenario against eachmeasurement condition and then deter-mine which scenario does better in sat is-fying the top-level goals .

Shlftmg Goals, Changmg DeclslonsWe usually learn a lot from this process.We may find that a goal that we selectedat the beginning turns out to be unreal-istic. We learn this because no matterwhat we do in any scenario, we simplycannot achieve this part icular goal giventhe resources we are willing to spendand the time we are willing to commit.We then may wish to change our goalsor maybe see if we can achieve them in60 years instead of 40, and thus leave alegacy for our grandchildren. We mayalso discover through discussions someother ways to manage our property,thus creating another alternative sce-nario. Such changes are fine, becausenow it’s inexpensive to look at differentfutures and different goals until we are

comfortable with our “final decision.”This final decision is, of course, only ten-

tative. It is likely that next year or the yearafter, we, as well as our world, will havechanged enough that our “final decision“may be outdated. But because we havedone our homework, know our land andhave increased our understanding, we cango through the NED process again prettyquickly and efficiently.

The NED team has worked out howto execute the decision process we havejust described. The Deer Hill case studyis our first formal case study. We havelearned much and realize we have yetmuch to learn.

The NED team is currently start ing for-mal case studies with the Maryland De-partment of Natural Resources in Balti-more; the Nature Conservancy in Georgia;Paul Smiths Col lege in New York; Casey& Co. Forestry in Wilkesboro, North Car-olina; and others. We are currently seekingother forestry consultants, state and privateforest managers and private landowners

willing to work with us to test NED.If you are interested in NED or wish to

see more detai led descriptions of the deci-sion process, contact H. Michael Rauscherat USDA Forest Service, 1577 BrevardRoad, Asheville, NC 28806; (828) 667-526,ext. 102; <mrauscher@fs.fed.us>; or Mark J.Twery at USDA Forest Service, l?O. Box968, Burlington, VT 05402; (802) 951-6771,ext. 1040; <mtwery@fs.fed.us>. q

H. Michael Rauscher is research scientist withthe USDA Forest Service in the Bent Creek Ex-perimental Forest in Asheville, North Carolina;John E. Spearman Jr is manager of Deer HillTree Farm in Gourdin, South Carolina; C. Pre-ston Fout is consulting forester with Shaw,McLeod, Belser & Hurlbutt Inc. in Sumter,South Carolina; Robert H. Giles Jr is professoremeritus at Virginia Polytechnic Institute bState University in Blacksburg, Virginia; andMark J. Twery is project leader and researchscientist with the USDA Forest Service inBurlington, Vermont.

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