Timber Harvesting Essentials

- Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

This video covers important information about harvesting timber that anyone might be interested in learning, especially those who own forest land property.

Harvesting timber is something that people only do once in a while, and so it's important to do it right.

Sometimes people get distracted by the value of timber and the price they're gonna be paid, and they forget a key thing, and that is harvesting timber in such a way that you encourage a new forest to grow back in.

So today we're gonna look at three different things.

We're gonna look at competing vegetation, deer impacts or deer effect on young forest coming in and also light.

My colleague Dave Jackson is gonna talk next about competing vegetation.

- Dave Jackson here with Penn State Extension.

Let's first start by defining regeneration.

And regeneration is simply the process of growing a new forest from seedlings and sprouts.

And as my colleague mentioned, there are many factors that interfere with regeneration.

We're gonna talk about competing and invasive plants.

So these plants predominantly interfere with the growth of a new forest, with that regeneration by casting dense shade on the fourth floor and competing for resources such as water, nutrients, and light.

So why do we have so many of these plants today?

Why are they such a problem today when they weren't in the past?

Is that these plants are very shade-tolerant typically, that means they can grow well in shady under stories.

So over a hundred years as our forest developed, they can become very common.

And number two is that they're not preferred to be browsed by white tail deer.

So these species are very low on their preference and they're allowed to proliferate.

Some of the very common plants that we see or what we have around me here today.

So this is Japanese Barberry, one of our invasive plants.

This is Hay-scented Fern.

And what I have behind me here is Striped Maple.

So these are some of our most common plants.

They all have become very numerous and can become very extensive and just cover forest under stories.

So it's very important that you control these plants prior to having a timber harvest.

Most commonly, we're gonna use herbicide applications to do our work.

Oftentimes people think we can control them through cutting, but most times after cutting, they just simply re sprout.

So herbicides are gonna be your most effective approach.

So up next, we have my colleague Sanford Smith, and he's gonna talk about deer and deer impacts.

- Now we're gonna talk about deer and their impacts on forested areas that might be harvested for timber.

There are many ways deer can impact forests.

One is they reduce the number of young trees in the area.

Another is they decrease the species composition of an area.

That means the number of different types of species there.

And they also decrease the height of sprouts and seedlings.

Now, here we have some stump sprouts.

These are Red Maples.

you can see how they've all been nipped right off there.

And these are never gonna grow into tall, healthy trees.

Evidence of too many deer in an area or high deer impact would be where you have browse lines, where everything is munched off below about five feet, or you have lots of undesirable species that deer don't prefer to eat.

And what are you gonna do about the problem of high deer impact in a forested area?

One is you can increase the hunting in that area.

The hunting of does will help to reduce the impact of deer in an area.

Another thing you can do is put up woven wire fences around the harvest area, which can be expensive for the average landowner, but for larger landowners or state lands and such woven wire fences are used extensively to keep deer out of those areas.

Now Dave's gonna talk about managing light to the forest floor.

- All right.

The last thing we're gonna talk about is the amount of light reaching the forest floor.

It's important to note that different species of trees have different tolerances for shade.

We call that their shade tolerance.

That means some species can grow very well in shade and other species demand more sunlight, the sun loving species.

Some examples are a Sugar Maple, for example, does very well in shady understory conditions.

But if we're trying to grow oak and we're trying to grow species like black cherry, then those species are much more sun loving and sun demanding, and we need to let large amounts of light into that understorey in order to regenerate those species.

So foresters have developed harvesting methods that address those species preferences for light, and these systems can be utilized when harvesting to let in the proper amount of light, depending on the species that you're trying to match for whether it's Sugar Maple, or whether it's Black Cherry, for example.

So ultimately on this site, a Forester was involved in prescribed treatments to control the competing vegetation, prior to the harvest.

A deer exclusion fence was put around the perimeter to reduce the impact that the white tail deer were having.

And large amount of light was led in here through this type of harvesting method to grow these sun loving species, like you see around me.

Like this Northern Red Oak and this yellow Poplar that I have behind me.

So that was the prescription based on the objective for the ownership here to grow these sun-loving species.

So for more information on this competition, deer and light theme, be sure to go to the Penn State Extension website and check out our fact sheet on regenerating hardwood forest.