Small Woodlot Management

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Climax species like white cedar, white spruce, sugar maple, and balsam fir are quite shade tolerant and only reproduce under the forest canopy. If a catastrophic disturbance removes the forest canopy, the forest will then quickly revert to an earlier stage.

Some trees, such as the ponderosa pine, will reproduce well in either sun or shade. Succession in these forests will look more like this:

1. Grass and forbs.
2. Shrub and seedlings.
3. Sapling—pole stage.
4. Young forest.
5. Mature forest.
6. Old growth.

The dominant species is the same through the entire succession, but wildlife will vary according to the amount and composition of shorter brush and trees.

Each stage in the forest succession is favorable to a certain group of wildlife. Your management can halt, slow down, speed up, or reverse this natural succession, or you can allow it to proceed naturally. Whatever you do will affect the wildlife present. Before the settlers arrived with their need for lumber and cleared areas for agriculture, natural catastrophes such as windstorms, insect plagues, and wildfires—either from natural causes or lit by Native Americans—produced clear-cut areas in the forests, reversing succession for a time. The frequency of these fires would, of course, vary widely in different parts of he country, but in some areas they were quite frequent.

Protection from natural disasters only benefits certain trees. For instance, recent research has found that the giant sequoia in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains is dependent upon fire for reproduction. The larger trees are very fire resistant and the seeds need a mineral soil to germinate and grow. When a fire burns off the accumulated duff (decaying leaves, twigs, etc.) on the forest floor, then the seeds can germinate and grow. With the fire suppression in the protected groves where these huge trees grow, giant sequoia reproduction has been nil. Controlled burning is now being tried in an effort to enhance sequoia reproduction.

Without these natural disasters, natures harvests if you will, America's forests would long ago have all been converted to old-growth climax forests, to the total exclusion of subclimax species with their associated flora and fauna.

Make a Plan

So...how do you start? The first step in woodlot management is formulating a management plan. It should be written and reviewed every few years. There are three steps to developing a woodland plan. They probably should be approached simultaneously, but for clarity we will approach them separately.

The first step is goal setting. What do you want from your woodlands? Hiking? Hunting? Bird watching? Mushroom hunting? Do you want a steady supply of firewood? How about lumber for your own use? Is income from a timber sale attractive to you?

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