Chadwick Oliver

Yale University | YU · Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry

An overview of managing forest ecosystems from silvicultural and management view points including the hierarchy within which management decisions are taken from the operational to the policy levels.

The increased understanding of how forests grow—forest stand dynamics Forest stand dynamics will not be in italics when referring to the subject (e.g., forest stand dynamics), but will be in italics when referring to the book (e.g., Forest Stand Dynamics) is both changing our perceptions of forests and enabling us to provide more commodity and non-...

Much hard work with periodic, exciting breakthroughs by academicians, students, and practicing foresters of several generations slowly congealed into what has become “forest stand dynamics.” Repeated applications of “stand reconstruction” techniques led to an understanding that trees invade forests in pulses as growing space becomes available follo...

The recovery of tree species composition after disturbance depends on dispersal either from nearby forests or from surviving individuals within the disturbed area. Understanding the influence of proximity to mature forests on species composition of regenerating secondary forests can help in predicting the trajectory of recovery from anthropogenic d...

The campaign to plant a trillion trees provided an easily understood approach to reduce the threat of global warming. However, focusing on trees does not consider that a maturing forest releases carbon (C) from dying trees offsetting C intake from growth of other trees, and results in only a one-time carbon storage benefit. Under sustainable manage...

Seed arrival is a limiting factor for the regeneration of diverse tropical forests and may be an important mechanism that drives patterns of tree species’ distribution. Here we quantify spatial and seasonal variation in seed rain of secondary forests in southern Bahia, Brazil. We also examine whether secondary forest age enhances seed dispersal and...

Mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) image classification capitalizes on the increasing spectral and spatial resolutions of available hyperspectral image data to identify the presence, and potentially the abundance, of a given cover type or endmember. Previous studies using MTMF have relied on extensive user input to obtain a reliable classificat...

Cambridge Core - Environmental Science - Global Resources and the Environment - by Chadwick Dearing Oliver

Large-scale wind disturbances shape forest structure and composition and leave long lasting legacies. Adequate understanding of the role of disturbances in tropical stand dynamics is necessary to guide management efforts. In this study, we used field data to characterize the effects of a major hurricane in broadleaf and pine stands in Northern Nica...

Quantification of stream contributions to global carbon cycling is key to understanding how freshwater streams transmit and transform carbon between terrestrial and atmospheric pools. To date, greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from freshwaters, particularly in mountainous regions, remains poorly characterized due to a lack of d...

Deadwood, long recognized as playing an important role in storing carbon and releasing it as CO2 in forest ecosystems, is more recently drawing attention for its potential role in the cycling of other greenhouse trace gases. Across three Northeastern and Central US forests, mean methane (CH4) concentrations in deadwood were 23 times atmospheric lev...

Using a concept proposed by Stehman and Czaplewski (1997), we implemented spatially-explicit Monte Carlo simulations to test the effects of manually introduced horizontal positional error on standard inter-rater statistics derived from twelve classified high-resolution images. Through simulations we found that both overall and kappa accuracies decr...

The mid-rise city of the Anthropocene age is formed from materials extracted, smelted, sintered, or synthesized through intensive fossil-energy based industrial processes with significant environmental footprints. Predictions of dramatic global population growth and urbanization suggest that the demands for these materials and processes will rise s...

Resilience has moved from being a peripheral ecological concept to a central goal, in the development discourse. While the concept has become popular, operationalizing resilience has been difficult. Many frameworks have been proposed to operationalize resilience but no common framework has been agreed upon. The present article demonstrates a step b...

Context The Amur tiger and leopard, once roaming over the Eurasian continent, are now endangered and confined to the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, Russia—a landscape that has been increasingly fragmented due to human activities. The ultimate fate of these big cats depends on whether they can resettle in their previous main historical range in NE China. R...

The report by Naudts et al. concludes that forest management in Europe during the last 260 years has failed to result in net CO2 removal from the atmosphere. The authors have reached this conclusion through their failure to consider a key factor in their otherwise comprehensive analysis. The authors present an analysis of net carbon emissions from...

The Integrated Landscape and Livelihood Management System (IL2MS) aims to help forest managers in India make informed decisions based on the dynamics of forests and forest-dependent communities. This report explains the state of forest management in India and provides a decision-making framework that can help the Forest Department simultaneously ad...

The forest stand structure class old-growth has previously been qualitatively described as having several distinct sub-structures. Species composition, diameter distribution, and other structural features commonly associated with old-growth in the Pacific Northwest are quite variable. We determined which quantitative stand structure variables are c...

On the Ground Across the United States, farmers and ranchers are getting older, and fewer young operators are entering the agricultural workforce than in the past. We statistically and cartographically explored demographic trends among farm and ranch operators in Wyoming to see if and how the agricultural community was aging. Census records indicat...

Functional restoration of forests can be addressed as a combined socioeconomic and ecological complex system that involves both spatial and temporal hierarchies. Neither socioeconomic nor ecological systems are stable or have any central control or organization. Instead, they can change at different scales in many ways and be more or less vibrant—a...

Species concepts and the definition of a species are discussed in the context of sustainable forest management and the sustainability of biological systems in general. Sustainable forestry requires that the habitats created by silvicultural manipulation match the ecological niches of the species being managed, enabling them not only to grow but to...

Life-cycle analyses, energy analyses, and a range of utilization efficiencies were developed to determine the carbon dioxide (CO2) and fossil fuel (FF) saved by various solid wood products, wood energy, and unharvested forests. Some products proved very efficient in CO2 and FF savings, while others did not. Not considering forest regrowth after har...

To determine whether reforestation efforts in the denuded hills have significant impacts on hydrology in the Xinjiang River watershed, the authors examined eight land-cover scenarios to compare hydrologic responses and to provide a conceptual basis for restoration practices. The authors analyzed a 17-year time period using remote sensing to develop...

China undertook a Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) between 1998 and 2010 to prevent soil erosion, desertification, and the decline of natural forest resources. This paper uses one of the most highly profiled species among the World’s Red List, the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) as an indicator species to demonstrate that conservation...

Natural resources are neither uniformly nor randomly distributed across the Earth. Rather, they are commonly grouped within geomorphologic and climatic boundaries. These groups—“Ecological Zones”—are generally large and cross political and socioeconomic boundaries. It is cumbersome to coordinate effective management for many values across these lar...

While forests have the capacity to sequester significant amounts of carbon, the natural and anthropogenic processes driving carbon fluxes in forests are complex and difficult to measure. However, since land use change is estimated to be the second largest source of carbon emissions to the atmosphere after the burning of fossil fuels, understanding...

Limited tree size variation in coastal Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) plantations makes them susceptible to developing high height to diameter ratios (H/D same units) in the dominant trees. The H/D of a tree is a relative measure of stability under wind and snow loads. Experimental plot d...

A Douglas-fir (Pseudotsugamenziesii (Mirb.) Franco) thinning study was established in 1959 in a stand begun after logging in 1930. Thinnings to set basal area densities were done in 1959, 1962, 1966, and 1970. On each plot both large and small trees were removed since average basal area per tree was kept constant before and after thinning. Volume g...

Advances and retreats of the cast Nooksack glacier and snow avalanches and rock falls have created a mosaic of midelevation forests in the Nooksack valley, ranging in age from 7 to over 800 years since a major disturbance. Trees, shrubs, and herbaceous species invaded disturbed areas simultaneously. Forest development followed a general pattern: (i...

Stands of western hemlock (Tsugaheterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) and Sitka spruce (Piceasitchensis (Bong.) Carr.) on low-elevation, upland sites in coastal southeast Alaska develop as single-generation stands after stand-replacing disturbances and as multiple-generation stands after minor disturbances. Both stand types were studied. Spruce grew rapidly a...

Automated methods for capturing geometric and spectral properties of individual tree crowns are becoming increasingly viable options for use in natural resource planning. Crown isolation techniques are needed that are capable of adapting to the changing availability and resolutions of remotely sensed data. Data integration, or the fusion of two dis...

The goal of this study was to develop a decision rule heuristic that would incorporate theories of forest stand dynamics and crown competition into an automatic crown detection and crown size search algorithm. Specifically, we sought to develop new multi-dimensional template matching methods fused with knowledge-based decision rules that model spat...

Sustainability of agricultural landscapes depends largely on land-use practices. As one of the most productive and widespread agricultural soils, loess is often deep and easily eroded, posing grand challenges for environmental sustainability around the world. One prime example is the Loess Plateau of China, which has been cultivated for more than 7...

Contextually-based distance and proximity functions derived from the axioms of point set topology are applied at the branch and crown-level for species differentiation between eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) and eastern white pine (Pinus strobus). Point set topology is a branch of mathematics that offers methods to describe the connectivity and...

This chapter describes the scientific basis for managing wildlife and other values across forested landscapes, and discusses the organization of the Landscape Management System (LMS) and how its modularity allows it to be improved and integrated with other systems. Managing landscapes can enhance their value to humans by providing appropriate habit...

Tree species composition and structure of a 40-year chronosequence of secondary forests was compared with old-growth forests in southern Bahia, Brazil. Twelve stands were randomly selected that represented three age classes: 10, 25, and 40year old with four replications in each class. All stands selected had been established after abandonment from...

Background/Question/Methods: Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) experienced a serious shrinking of its range and a significant population decline during the past century in Northeastern China and Russian Far East. Habitat loss and fragmentation caused by forest exploitation have been considered as the primary threat to the tigers’ survival. Conse...

Sustainable forestry can be a useful concept when it includes both spatial equity and the sustainable development concept of intergenerational equity. Using this definition and criteria such as those developed by the Montreal Process, each country can examine itself in a matrix to determine if it is overly protecting or exploiting its ecosystems ac...

Forests provide 1.75 billion cubic meters of timber each year and a similar amount of fuel wood. Our understanding of forest ecosystems is far from complete. Biotechnology can provide means to speed up adaptation by forest species in response to pathogen introduction, climate change, or other perturbations. Consensus building on forest issues is al...

Disturbances influence forest dynamics across a range of spatial and temporal scales. In tropical forests most studies have focused on disturbances occurring at small spatial and temporal scales (i.e., gap dynamics). This is primarily due to the difficulty of reconstructing long‐term disturbance histories of forests in which most tree species lack...

Red oaks – cherrybark oak (Quercus pagoda Raf.), willow oak (Quercus phellos L.), water oak (Quercus nigra L.), and Nuttall oak (Quercus texana Buckley; aka: Quercus nuttallii Palmer) – are not regrowing in Mississippi Delta river floodplain forests in the southeastern United States in sufficient numbers to sustain the former species composition an...

There is a surplus of wood growing in the world, despite generalizations about highly visible over-harvesting of some species and locations that suggests otherwise. Dealing with the oversupply by excluding natural forests from harvest and investing in intensive plantations is a risky strategy. Plantations require high financial investment, generall...

As defined here, sustainable forestry ensures each ecosystem provides its fair share of values, neither overly depriving itself or other times and places of the ability to provide values. This “working” definition builds on other efforts to examine sustainability and uses the Montreal Process criteria as values to be sustained. It is first importan...

Few models evaluate the effects of forest management options on wildlife habitat and incorporate temporal and spatial trends in forest growth. Moreover, existing habitat models do not explicitly consider economic trade-offs or allow for landscape level projections. To address these concerns, we linked standard wildlife habitat suitability models wi...

Achieving a goal of sustainable forestry will probably take time as people agree on what sustainability means at the global, subcontinental, national, and regional scales. Comparing seven criteria of sustainable forestry with information at different scales suggests that the world could practice sustainable forestry, but there are currently imbalan...

This study analyzes the performance of publicly traded U.S. and Canadian firms using data from 1998 annual reports. Sales in 1998 were lackluster but mostly positive in North America, as evidenced by paper sales increasing about 2% for both U.S. and Canadian firms. Total annual sales increased 2% for U.S. pulp, paper, and packaging firms but actual...

Recent progress toward the application of process-based models in forestmanagement includes the development of evaluation and parameter estimation methods suitable for models with causal structure, and the accumulation of data that can be used in model evaluation. The current state of the art of process modeling is discussed in the context of fores...

The maintenance of the earth's biological diversity is widely seen as both necessary for ecosystem integrity and aesthetically desirable. This book focuses on how biodiversity can be maintained in forested ecosystems, particularly in those forests that are subject to timber harvesting. At the core of the book lies the concept that diversity should...

It is unlikely, given the often-contentious history of the national forests, that incremental change in their administration can resolve fundamental differences in values. So concludes a task force appointed by the Society of American Foresters (SAF) to review federal forest management; its analysis and recommendations have been published in Forest...

Intensive forest management has commonly become associated with forest plantations that have high initial investment costs in stand establishment. These intensive plantations will probably not produce high quality wood because they will be physically and economically unstable if grown to long rotations, and so will probably need to be harvested whe...

A decision support system was developed to prioritize diverse young stands for precommercial thinning treatments. This system utilizes variables to characterize stand structure and assess the potential for stand differentiation. Stands with greater differentiation potential are considered a low priority for precommercial thinning because of their l...

A landscape approach to forest management must consider the implications of alternative scenarios across stands and through time. The Landscape Management System, a computer program, facilitates implementation of this approach by integrating forest inventories, spatial information, growth models, visualization, summarization, and analysis. A case s...

Fires occur frequently in dry forests of the Inland West. Fire effects vary across the landscape, reflecting topography, elevation, aspect, slope, soils, and vegetation attributes. Patches minimally affected by successive fires may be thought of as ‘refugia’, islands of older forest in a younger forest matrix. Refugia support species absent within...

A disturbance to a stand is often part of larger event which impacts a large landscape area. Across a landscape, a disturbance event leaves a mosaic of” conditions. The event can miss some Stands, kill all trees in other stands, and kill only some trees in other stands. Stands regrow through certain processes and create certain structures after a d...

Stem analysis of mature Abiesamabilis (Dougl.) Forbes (Pacific silver fir) trees was used to analyze patterns of radial growth in areas of southwestern Washington where this species is experiencing a severe crown decline associated with heavy tephra deposition from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Reductions in stem growth after 1980 appeared...

Changes in old growth structural features as well as susceptibilities to disturbances were projected in stands typical of the eastern Washington Cascades. Projected changes with and without silvicultural operations were made. Doing no silvicultural activities in these stands will not rapidly increase old growth structural features and will allow th...

Forest health is most appropriately based on the scientific paradigm of dynamic, constantly changing forest ecosystems. Many forests in the Inland West now support high levels of insect infestations, disease epidemics, fire susceptibilities, and imbalances in stand structures and habitats because of natural processes and past management practices....

Paleo-vegetation studies have shown that vegetation has changed in composition and extent in the intermountain Pacific Northwest over the past 20,000 years. Today, both natural and human-induced disturbances have long-term influence on the structure and composition of eastside vegetation. Disturbance may enhance landscape diversity, therefore, the...

Forest management of eastern Oregon and Washington began in the late 1800s as extensive utilization of forests for grazing, timber, and irrigation water. With time protection of these values developed into active management for these and other values such as recreation. Silvicultural and administrative practices, developed to solve problems at a pa...

The development of six mixed-species, even-aged stands was reconstructed in the eastern Washington Cascade Range. All stands were within the Grand Fir Climax Series and began following stand replacement disturbances. Western larch (Larixoccidentalis Nutt.) and lodgepole pine (Pinuscontorta Dougl. ex Loud.), when present, formed an upper stratum ove...

A simple stand model is developed to assess the influence of management activities in old growth Douglas-fir forests on atmospheric CO, levels. Two natural disturbance regimes (450- and 240-year stand replacement fire cycles) are compared with four management regimes (45, 6 5 , 90-year plantation rotations, and conversion to non-forest use). Conver...

Forest management is becoming highly technical in both the natural and management sciences. Natural forests are in a constant state of disturbance and regrowth, rather than in a stable, steady state as previously thought. The contemporary social attitude is to reduce the extremes of natural and man-caused “boom and bust” cycles that affect animal a...

Much progress has been made during the past four decades in understanding how forest stands develop. The understanding increases both our basic ecological knowledge and our ability to do silvicultural manipulations for increasingly varied objectives.

Much of the world's forested land is dominated by mixed-species stands. Understanding the complex structure and dynamics of these mixtures is a necessary step in the process of formulating appropriate silvicultural systems for their management. David M. Smith, Professor Emeritus of Silviculture at Yale University, has devoted much of his career to...

Incluye bibliografía

Cherrybark oak (Quercus falcata var. pagodifolia Ell.) can create stands of complex structures when grown in even-aged conditions with American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis L.). Vertical spatial patterns and relative tree sizes reflect the initial spatial patterns and subsequent development of interacting trees. Rapid early height growth of syca...

A prototype decision rule base was developed to serve as an advisory system for silvicultural planning, prioritization, and decision making on the Okanogan National Forest in N-central Washington. -from Authors

Growth and yield estimates for unthinned stands from the Douglas-fir Stand Simulator (DFSIM; Curtis et al. 1981) and the Tree and Stand Simulator (TASS; Mitchell and Cameron 1985) were used to construct graphical three-dimensional representations of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii [Mirb.] Franco) stand growth on site index 44 meters (50 year). T...

A generalized three-dimensional model for tree growth containing tree size, number of trees per area, and stand age on the three axes can be shown to incorporate three previous models in the theoretical absence of differentiation and self-thinning. The previous models, each incorporating two of the three axes, are: the sigmoid growth models of tree...

The interaction of planted cherrybark oak (Quercus falcata var. pagodifolia Ell.) and American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis L.) was investigated on a flood plain of a minor stream in Arkansas. Oaks growing 20 ft or more from a sycamore attained a dominant position by 24 years, but were still smaller in diameter and height than dominant sycamores...

Advances in forest practices during the past few decades have been made in the midst of public debate over the role of forestry. It is time to assess the state of the art of silviculture and to project its evolution for the next 30 years - to reinforce the use of sound practices now employed and to shed outdated concepts and practices. To a large e...

Provides an overview of recent, current and likely trends in US forestry, paying attention to forest use (both wood products and non-timber uses, including recreation and wilderness management); quality and quantity of forest land; labour; investments; and the state of the art in silviculture, including stand protection, site preparation, regenerat...

Growth patterns of black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa Torr.& Gray) cuttings and red alder (Alnus rubra Bong.) wildlings were studied during the first year after planting on low elevation glacial till soils in western Washington, U.S.A. Black cottonwood height growth occurred earlier, with 88 percent of its height having been achieved by late Jul...

Growth patterns of naturally regenerated western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla [Raf.] Sarg.) were studied by stem analysis following partial cutting of a dense, second-growth stand on the Washington coast. Three partial cutting densities comparable to thinning, shelterwood cutting, and seed-tree cutting were established when the stand was 60 years ol...

Large-scale, man-created or natural disturbances play a mjaor role in determining forest structure and species composition in many areas of North America and probably other temperate and tropical forests. Trees begin growth by a variety of mechanisms — each of which can respond to disturbances of a different severity. Studies suggest: a single grou...

Forests in the eastern and northwestern United States often develop in even-aged patterns, with certain species predictably forming the upper canopy and others relegated to lower strata. The vertical sorting (or stratification) by species and broad ranges of diameters has sometimes led foresters and ecologists to assume these stands are all-aged. F...

The pattern of vertical stratification in mixed Douglas-fir (Pseudotsugamenziesii (Mirb.) Franco) and western hemlock (Tsugaheterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) stands was documented by observing tree interaction patterns on temporary plots in stands between 35 and 80 years old. It was found that Douglas-fir predictably dominated the hemlock. Several possibl...

A 0.36—ha area in the Harvard Forest, Petersham, Massachusetts, was intensively analyzed to determine its history. Natural and man—caused disturbances of varying magnitudes occurred periodically in the central New England mixed—species stand. Evidence of two hurricanes and a fire prior to 1803 were found. Between 1803 and 1952, 14 natural or man—ca...

In the southeastern Sand Hills, the undulating surface of a less permeable, compact formation beneath the superficial sands was found to have a major influence on the rooting pattern of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) and the moisture available to it by subsurface lateral movement. Site index of longleaf pine was related to the thickness of t...