Now, let's talk about we've conducted a stand evaluation,
we realize we have a lot of quality white oak material in here that's very valuable,
but it's all relatively the same age class and it's all relatively mature, say, over 80 years in age.
That's the scenario from a timber management standpoint where we really need to be
shifting from a focus of thinning and shifting our focus towards regeneration harvest.
And one of the primary harvests that we use here on the station and one that I want to talk about today is the shelterwood harvest.
And I'll talk about why we want to use a shelterwood and not just come in and clear cut this before we get into the methodology.
If you take a woods walk through your forest,
if you have a mature forest that looks similar to the one behind us, where you have a lot of large crowned,
large overstory trees in here and not a lot of that kind of mid diameter range of
say 14 to 20 inches, whereas these are well over 20 inches.
You probably don't have a lot of sunlight reaching the ground, particularly if it also has a midstory component of those shade tolerant stems we've
talked about with the dogwoods and the elm and the maple and species like that.
You get quite a bit of blockage from the sun reaching the forest floor.
And so one of the problems we have in these stands and the reasons why a lot of times
we can't come in and clear cut these stands and just start them over is that we don't have the regeneration pool on the ground.
And so we've done our evaluation, we look at the stand, say this land needs to be regenerated.
And we do a woods walk and we realize we don't have the oak regeneration in place.
There may be some little small six, seven inch stems in there on occasion of reproduction,
but we don't have the pool of larger oak regeneration in place to say okay
we can just take all this material, capture that value all in one harvest and be done with it.
You can do that. But the stand that you get back may not have a significant oak component to it.
You may have just reduced the amount of oak in your forest.
And so there are methods for us to setup our harvest before we ever come in with machinery.
And the harvest method itself that allow that oak regeneration to recruit from the seed
from the overstory and recruit from the oak regeneration that's in place currently.
And we call that the shelterwood method. The first thing we want to do,
let's kind of walk through a timeline on how we would conduct a shelterwood harvest in one of these stands.
So, again, this stand behind me is over 100 years old. It had a high basal area, high density of trees per acre.
It has a large amount of midstory stems in here that are blocking the sunlight reaching the ground.
And so we're going to have some seed, basically is what I'm getting at. There's some regeneration in place,
but we're gonna have to have some seed to get the stand reestablished with some white oak being a component of that stand in the future.
So the first thing I want to do before I do any operations is to do an acorn crop evaluation.
And the best time of year to do that is really to come out in September, early to mid-September after a storm event or something like that,
when you get some limbs knocked down out of the upper canopy. Evaluate those limbs and see if you have acorns present.
White oak trees will have acorn crops every year. They may be better some years than others, but they'll have an acorn crop every year.
If you have a good acorn crop, then you can begin your site preparation methods and your harvest methods.
If you don't have a good acorn crop, this stand's been here 100 years,
another year is not going to hurt anything. Wait until you have that acorn crop.
When we've seen failures in our research projects here on the station and in other places with shelterwoods,
as far as recruiting oak regeneration, one of the primary factors has been because we we timed it with a year where we didn't have the acorn crop.
And so if I'm going to increase the sunlight to the ground, I want to make sure I have some seed to take advantage of that,
because if I put sunlight on the ground, something is coming back rapidly. And we'll see that in a moment.
But I have to have that acorn crop in place. If I do, I can come in and begin my operations in this stand,
we had a heavy midstory in here that I talked about.
So our first operation was to do herbicide injection where we came in and did individual plant treatments,
where we removed individual trees through the stand to remove that shade tolerant component of species throughout the stand.
That alone increases our sunlight by as much as 15 percent. And so that operation alone is going to increase the sunlight to the ground.
We will then come in and mark the stand for its preparatory cut. So we're not clearcutting,
we're coming in and marking stems that need to be removed. Those are going to be the species that we don't want to manage for,
and it may be trees that don't really have the crown characteristics to produce
the sunlight environment or the acorn production that we're looking for.
The stems we want to leave, we're not going to leave them for very long.
Three to five years is how long our shelterwoods take to go from start to finish.
And so we want to leave some large crown trees that are going to give us some acorns and give us a really nice sunlight environment,
a partial sun, partial shade for the oak regeneration to take place.
Once we get that in place and we get the oak regeneration in place, whether it's two years, three years or four years down the road,
so we get some oak regeneration. You can see some around me here that's that's approaching a foot tall.
We really want that to be waist high.
We need, you know, several hundred stems per acre of three, four, five foot tall oak reproduction stems per acre for us to really say,
okay, we could probably come in and remove that overstory and have a regenerated forest system, sustainably regenerated forest.
And so that's a real quick overview of the shelterwood method.
One of the things I'll point out is that at the end of year three or four or five, when you say,
OK, I have enough oak regeneration in place, I can go ahead and take the overstory off.
If you're a landowner that doesn't really want to remove that overstory, It's okay to create that two
aged oak forest. We saw that back at the site where we were talking about thinning
one of these stands. A two aged oak forest is fine.
You could manage for that. At some point, though, if you're if you're wanting to capture that timber value,
and that really high value of those white oak logs, you're gonna want to remove that that that overstory.
And it's really better to do it while your regeneration is small. Once, though, that reproduction pool gets up ten, twelve, fifteen foot tall,
it becomes much more difficult to take the top off of the stand, if you will.
And so that's why we'd like to go ahead and just get that done and get our new forest in place, and keep that even aged system rolling.
So to show you an example of the crowns that we're talking about leaving, we don't want to leave what we call intermediate crowns.
And those are the crowns that are really narrow, don't have a lot of fullness or a lot of spread or a lot of size to them.
We want to leave the larger crowns. And if we pan up these white oaks behind me here are really good examples.
They have really large crowns, lots of leaf area, lots of fine twigs.
And that is indicative of a tree that's going to produce a lot of acorns or had the potential to produce a lot of acorns.
If that crown is, say, a third or a half smaller than that for this sized tree,
number one, the tree is not going to be very healthy because it doesn't have enough photosynthetic area to keep it healthy.
But it's also not going to be a very good seed producer for us when we're trying to get the acorns to the ground.
Let's take a moment and look at a similar stand that we've already performed a few operations in.
This stand is going through a shelterwood harvest currently here on the station,
and it's marked for thinning, as you can see, by the orange bark trees behind me.
And again, we did the same thing where we left a lot of large crowned overstory trees in here in both the white oak and the red oak group,
because even though we're talking about white oak sustainability, we still want some diversity in here.
So there's multiple oak species that we're trying to leave. And again, this is not going to be, even through these operations,
this is not going to be an oak monoculture by any means.
We will still have thousands of non-oak stems coming up into the regeneration pool in the stand.
We're just trying to make sure that oak is a component of that regeneration pool.
And one of the tools I didn't mention before is prescribed fire. It's something that we use quite a bit here on the station,
and it's a very useful tool to us here in the upland hardwood region. This stand right here,
we've done the injection work in here a couple of years back, and then we followed that up with a couple of burns
also. Cool season, dormant season burns where we're not damaging these high value stems in here, which is probably a point we need to make.
If you have a stand that has a lot of quality white oak logs and red oak logs in it,
you don't want to go into that stand in July and August and do a prescribed fire.
You could do a lot of damage.
You could cause mortality and degrade to the stems and cost yourself a lot of money to the value of your stand.
And so be very careful if you bring fire into these systems and you have a timber objective in the stands,
be very careful of your fuel loads and the time of year that you burn.
We may burn also to create wildlife habitat, which is fine,
but we still need to keep in mind if we're trying to maintain timber value, we can do some real damage with fire in these stands if
we're not careful. So we do dormant season burns here, like in this stand in February into middle of March,
we'll do our dormant season burns in here. The oak regeneration that's in place doesn't mind that fire as long as they're not new germinates.
If they recently sprouted from from the seed that falls,
Yes. We can do some damage to those and cause some mortality
and what we're trying to recapture here in some oak regeneration.
So that is another consideration.
Typically we'll do our burn before we start the shelterwood process just to kind of get everything on the same playing field.
We do our injection and then we come in and do a burn before we start the harvesting process,
because what we found is if we can get these oak seedlings on the same level as the competing vegetation and they grow at the same level,
the oaks are much more capable of competing with those stems over time.
But if we have maples in here that are that are eight and nine and ten foot tall that we didn't hit with injection,
those are strong competitors to the oak seedlings. And so that's the roll fire really plays for us.
Those non-oak species don't really like fire, so if we're able to put multiple burns into one of these stands,
we can actually begin to shift the species composition of this regeneration pool before we ever begin our harvesting operations.
And so that's one advantage we have in the upland hardwoods is that we can we can get moving before we really worry about the overstory and it
really gets us ahead of the game when we can start out with hundreds of oak seedlings per acre.
They may not be the height that we're looking for just yet,
but through our harvesting over a period of a couple of years, we'll have a nice oak regeneration pool in this stand
moving forward. To wrap things up with regard to managing these these upland
hardwood forests for white oak and the concept of white oak sustainability. We talked about two different thinning or harvesting methods,
and one is I have a stand I can thin. The other is this stand has reached maturity,
and I need to look at regenerating that stand through what we've talked about here today, using the shelterwood method.
If you have the oak regeneration in place, you can come in and clear cut that stand.
But but oftentimes we don't have that component.
And so think about that as you take a woods walk before, you know, if you have someone come out and say,
man, we want to purchase these white oak logs from you, take a woods walk.
Think about that. But you've also seen this isn't as straightforward as it would appear.
And so my final recommendation is to make sure you have a professional forester who can come in and
has knowledge in hardwood management and can help you make the right decision for your stand.
That's probably the most important take-home point
I can give you with regard to managing these stands sustainably, is seek some professional assistance on making your decisions,
and that'll help you to carry these stands and maintain their value over time.