FORESTRY IN THE UNITED
STATES. The purpose of forestry is to
secure the perpetuation and at the same time
the full use and benefit of the forest. Forestry
seeks to serve the people by making the highest
and most profitable use of large areas of land
not well suited to agriculture by conserving the
water supply, and by fostering the economical
production of wood commodities. The direct
benefits to be secured from the practice of
forestry are chiefly a continuous supply of wood
for all its various uses and the even distribution
of the water supply through protection of the
watersheds. Conditions peculiar to the western
part of the United States have made it necessary
for government forest work to deal also
with a very important use of the forest not
directly pertaining to forestry, namely, the grazing
of livestock on the national forests.
Forest Regions.— The problems of forestry
and the methods employed in solving them are
to a large extent of the forests themselves. The forests of the United States cover approximately 550,000,000 acres, or about 29 per cent
of the total land surface. There are five great
forest regions, three stretching from the
Atlantic seaboard to the Great Plains, which are
destitute of timber except along the margins
of the streams and on occasional elevations, and two west of the Great Plains. (a) The Northern Pine Forest extends from western Minnesota eastward to the Atlantic Ocean and from Canada southward to northern Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and New Jersey. From northern Ohio and New Jersey there is a gradually narrowing extension along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, taking in nearly all of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, western Maryland and western Virginia, and reaching as far south as northern Georgia. The characteristic tree of this forest is the white pine (Pinus strobus, Linn.).
White pine is a tree of the first commercial
importance; and of all the trees of North
America, it best combines the qualities of
utility, rapid growth, heavy yield, and ease of
management. Its former abundance and the
cheapness and varied usefulness of its lumber
made it an important factor in the
development of the States in which it grows. After an enormous exploitation the original forests are now approaching exhaustion. The most rapid reduction has taken place in its western and more important centre of distribution; but the greatest bodies of white pine in the country are still to be found in the northern portion of the Lake States. The cut of white pine reached its maximum in 1890, when the production in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota amounted to 8,597,623,000 board feet. In 1900 the cut in these States had fallen to 5,419,333,000. In 1913, the total cut of white pine in the United States was 2,568,636,000 board feet. The reduction in cut has been accompanied by a marked fall in the quality of the lumber; and the large-size, high-grade white pine lumber, once abundant on the market, has become scarce and expensive. The demand for low-grade white pine lumber has made it possible, from a business standpoint, to cut and market second-growth timber when comparatively small and young. For many years the pine output of the northeastern States has consisted almost wholly of second growth. Had fires not been allowed to run repeatedly over the slash left in logging the original stand, a large part of northern Michigan and other noted white pine regions would probably now be covered with second growth, much of it of merchantable value.
Since the partial destruction of white pine
in the eastern States, red spruce (Picea rubens, Sarg.) has become the principal commercial tree of this region. It grows usually in mixture with hardwoods, such as beech, birch, and maple. At high altitudes, however, there occur comparatively pure red spruce and balsam fir stands. The amount of spruce lumber sawed in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and West Virginia in 1914 was 781,292,000 board feet, a large proportion of which was red spruce. Spruce is now cut principally for paper pulp; and the production of spruce pulpwood in the United States in 1911 amounted to 1,612,355 cords. This includes all the other varieties of spruce as well as red spruce. The cut of balsam fir lumber in the United States in 1914 was 125,212,000