Stand Establishment

Artificial establishment is what most people are familiar with. This method is used where natural regeneration is not adequately established. The treatments involved include site clearing, remnant removal, site preparation, planting, and chemical and manual weeding.

Natural establishment may be as simple as doing a complete harvest in an overmature stand with a foot or more of snow on the ground to protect the new crop that is already established on the forest floor. More commonly, this method involves a series of partial cuts carried out over a period of 5 to 15 years to encourage or enhance establishment of natural regeneration. This treatment is referred to as a shelterwood. This treatment can only be applied to stands that contain a minimum of 30% tolerant species. These species have the ability to germinate and grow in the shade of a nearly full canopy. Trees that fit into this category include red spruce, eastern hemlock, white pine, sugar maple, yellow birch, red oak and ash.

Another treatment is called stand conversion whereby an overtopping stand is removed in order to release a more desirable understorey. Usually this is a poor quality hardwood overstory overtopping young softwood regeneration.

The seed tree method is another stand establishment technique. This method is simply a modified harvest where you leave 10 to 12 wind-firm trees uniformly scattered throughout a cutover. Cutting is followed by some sort of scarification to produce a good seedbed. This method has worked very well in low volume white pine stands in Shelburne County, it is also well suited to managing yellow birch. For best results, the scarification should be carried out during a moderate to good seed year.

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