THE 20TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE LOBLOLLY PINE GROWTH AND YIELD RESEARCH COOPERATIVE
Last month Jim Vardaman attended the 20th annual meeting of the
co-op that developed and continues to upgrade PTAEDA2. Its membership
includes the biggest timber users and timberland owners in the U.S.: Bowater,
Boise Cascade, Champion, G-P, IPCO, Mead, Temple-Inland, Union Camp,
Westvaco, Weyerhaeuser, and Willamette. No one has a bigger stake in
perfecting a growth-and-yield model.
When it began its work, it established 186 permanent plots in unimproved
loblolly pine plantations across the natural range of the species. At that
time the plantations were 8-25 years old. Over the years the utility of some
of them has been destroyed by icestorms, insect attacks, fires, and ownership
changes, but 100 of them still provide valuable data. Re-measurement of them
at three-year intervals has just been completed for the sixth time, so the
oldest now exceed 40 years.
As new technologies have been developed, a new group of plots has been
established to determine their impacts. As soon as new data warrant it,
PTAEDA2 is updated; an example is the addition of the fertilizer effect to
PTAEDA2V about six months ago. We think that the work of the co-op has been
and is the most important forestry research. You can’t decide whether to
utilize a new technology until you can predict how it will work with all
other growth factors.
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