Biometric forestry improves crop yields
Atlanta Business Chronicle / April 19-25, 2002

"States in the Northwest have more forest land, but most of that is owned by the federal government," said Richard Borders, professor of forest biometrics at the University of Georgia.  "In Georgia, most forest land is in the hands of private landowners."

But the demand for lumber and paper products is rising sharply, both in Georgia and across the country, even as available forest land diminishes.

Consequently, advances in forest biometrics -- employing sophisticated mathematical models to measure and project how much wood various stands of trees will produce -- is becoming ever more critical to the industry.

Preserving resources

"We want to make sure we harvest enough wood to produce what we need," Borders said.  "But we don't want to deplete our resources and do long-term damage to our forest systems."

Georgia is home to vast stands of Southern yellow pine -- loblolly, slash, long-leaf and short-leaf -- that produce lumber and a host of paper and other pulp products.  The demand for the Southern yellow pine is at record levels, even as the amount of acreage declines.  Population growth -- there are now over 8 million Georgians -- hasn't helped.

"Suburbanization is using up land, plus the federal government is backing off on what it will allow to be cut on its land," Borders said.  "So we have to improve the productivity of each acre that's available."

Enter biometrics, aided by modern computer power that could not have been imagined a mere decade ago.  Although biometric measures have been used to assess forest output since at least the 1930s, today's computers allow for far more sophisticated growth models.

Researchers take samples from stands of trees and, by employing mathematical and statistical equations, extrapolate on the findings, simulating the development of stands of trees over time.  UGA's Warnell School of Forest Resources is a national leader in the field.

Better management of pine plantations, coupled with genetic improvements in seedlings, have tripled and even quadrupled wood production over the last 15 years, Borders said.

With the trend toward fast-growing stands and shorter rotations, more juvenile wood is being pushed to market.  Because young trees are adequate for paper products but not for building materials, UGA researchers are probing ways to strengthen wood as well as determining optimal uses of wood at varying ages.

Better management

For Borders, a key long-term goal is to make biometric models "more site-specific."

"Right now, we're very good at predicting averages, that is, what output will be across a very large area, such as a particular area of the state," he said.  "But we'd like to get better at predicting what's going to happen on each individual landowner's property. That's where computing power really comes in.  You need a lot more power to do those projections."

It's all a far cry from the late 19th century, when trees were clear-cut to make way for King Cotton.

"The loblolly pine was cut really hard in the South, and so all the best genotypes -- the best trees -- got cut, too," said Kelsey Milner, a forestry professor at the University of Montana.

When cotton waned, fallow land was allowed to grow back willy-nilly into scrub pine, before management practices, begun in the early 1900s, started improving the lot of forest lands, a science still being perfected.

"Millions and millions of acres have been put into forests," Borders said. "Georgia now has a lot more trees than it did 100 years ago.  Fields used to be where a lot of forests are today."