Green Horizons

For more than half a century, the team at Pioneer Forest, a large, privately-owned forest located in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks, has worked to restore more than 146,000 acres of the region’s woodlands. From the beginning, founder Leo Drey challenged forest owners and managers to think in long-range terms about forests, their management, and the many public benefits forests provide. University of Missouri studies have confirmed positive management results through Drey’s use of uneven-aged forest management using single-tree selection harvests.

In July of 2004, Leo and his wife, Kay, donated Pioneer Forest to the L-A-D (Leo A. Drey) Foundation to ensure that the forest will continue to be managed through environmentally sound and sustainable practices, the largest private gift of its kind in Missouri history. "I have been privileged to have had such good people to work with over the years," Drey said. "I am pleased that the Foundation will continue to manage the forest just as I have done."

Forest manager Terry Cunningham talks about uneven-aged management with forest landowners during Pioneer’s "Keeping the Forest" field day.

The following article discusses the successful forest management system utilized at Pioneer Forest.

Single-Tree Harvesting

Approximately every 20 years, or when a particular stand achieves a closed canopy and the trees show signs of slower growth, trees are selectively harvested at Pioneer Forest. This allows for the periodic removal of some of the growth. Growth per acre has increased nearly four-fold and standing volume per acre has tripled, all while harvesting timber from the forest using an uneven-aged management system. Choosing trees to harvest is as simple as cutting the worst trees and leaving the best within each diameter or product class. In addition to size, variables considered when deciding which trees to harvest include poor form, vigor, disease, and damage. Proper spacing of tree canopies is as important as spacing of the tree trunks on the ground in order to ensure healthy, vigorous growth of the remaining trees.

Uneven-aged management allows for retention of a forest, even immediately after a harvest as shown above.

Harvests remove 12-15 trees per acre or 40% of the standing volume. The result is that as many or more trees of all sizes and age classes are left standing as were cut during the harvest. Uneven-age management allows for the retention of a forest on every acre, even immediately after harvest. Careful marking, cutting, and skidding is absolutely essential to protect standing trees as cut logs are hauled out of the woods.

Continuous Forest Inventory

Pioneer Forest managers collect intensive forest inventory data on 486 permanent plots every five years. These permanent plots are subject to the same kind and intensity of treatment (including harvesting) as applied to the forest surrounding them. This continuously updated data set, now nearly 50 years old, provides one of the most interesting long-term records on the dynamics of growth and development for a forested landscape in the Ozarks. The inventory was improved in 1992 by measuring all trees between 1.5 and 5.0 inches dbh (diameter at breast height, or 4.5 feet) and collecting regeneration data on seedlings. The data clearly show that managing a forest by the single-tree selection harvest technique can be successful over long periods of time in the Missouri Ozarks.

Top: Logs harvested in 2001 from Pioneer Forest were processed into flooring (bottom) at Smith Flooring as part of Value Missouri’s pilot project in marketing "green" wood from the Show-Me State.

Spreading the Word

Pioneer personnel are eager to take visitors on a walk through their woods so folks can see for themselves that this management technique does work. This fall they hosted a two-day workshop in Salem, MO and over 150 people from across the Midwest attended.

Value Missouri and "Green" Wood

Pioneer Forest has been nationally recognized as a working forest using environmentally responsible forest management. Combining their earth-friendly philosophy with Show-Me pride, Pioneer Forest has worked with Value Missouri, a private sector forest stewardship group, and Smith Flooring of Mountain View, Mo., to produce some 1.5 million board feet of Value Missouri flooring that has since found its way into many homes across the state. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the most stringent program recognizing sustainable management and guaranteeing "green" or environmentally friendly wood products for consumers, certified Pioneer Forest in 2003. Once again Pioneer is teaming up with Smith Flooring and soon consumers across the country will have the opportunity to purchase the first FSC-certified wood products from Missouri’s forests. And it all started with one individual back in 1951 when he saw value in Missouri’s cutover and abused forests.

To learn more about Pioneer Forest, visit their website, www.pioneerforest.com. Value Missouri is online at www.valuemissouri.com.