Timberland Management Research Articles

Practical constraints to timber management among African American owners of heir property

Managing timberland can increase productivity and income for owners, but serious constraints to meeting these or other goals face owners of heir property. The term heir property is used to describe property owned as an undivided interest among heirs of an original owner who died without a probated will. Heirs may be numerous, span multiple generations and geographies, and have very different connections to the land. Heir property is a common phenomenon among African American landowners in the southeastern United States (“South”), a region where timberland represents over 60 percent of total land use. Because owners are numerous, title to the land is considered “clouded,” limiting access to government programs and commercial credit that could be used to engage in the many activities (e.g., stand establishment, fertilization, prescribed burning, thinning, harvesting, replanting) associated with timberland management. We use available data to estimate that over one million acres of timberland in the South are owned as heir property. We document the financial costs and the specific obstacles likely to be encountered by heir property owners, including long time horizons associated with timberland management and the likelihood that heir owners representing different generations may not agree on how to manage the property. We propose a set of policy changes that state and federal government agencies could consider to increase productivity and income for heir property owners while improving overall forest health.

Impact of increased wood pellet demand on biodiversity in the south‐eastern United States

AbstractIncreasing wood pellet exports from the United States are projected to lead to changes in land use and timberland management, including a shift from natural timberland to pine plantations. These projected changes may impact biodiversity. This study aims to quantify potential biodiversity impacts of increased wood pellet demand in the south‐eastern United States in a spatially explicit manner. We determined differences according to an index of potential species richness (for total, threatened and endemic species and four taxonomic groups) between scenarios of high and low demand for wood pellets, while taking into account potential developments in other wood markets and other land uses. Increased demand for wood pellets was projected to cause both positive and negative biodiversity impacts. Negative shifts in total potential species richness were projected for areas in Florida, coastal Virginia and North Carolina, and parts of the Gulf Coast. Positive shifts in total potential species richness were projected in parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas. In some locations, the direction of change differed per taxonomic group, highlighting the importance of analysing different taxonomic groups. Shifts in potential species richness due to increased wood pellet demand were considerably smaller compared to the changes due to other drivers, such as urbanization and increased timber demand. Biodiversity impacts due to wood pellet demand should therefore be considered in the context of other drivers of land‐use change and biodiversity loss. Our results provide information that allows policymakers, industry and NGOs to focus on areas of concern and take appropriate mitigation measures to limit negative biodiversity impacts and promote positive impacts. The spatially explicit approach presented in this study can be applied to different regions and drivers of land‐use change, to show how projected demand for an internationally traded commodity may lead to impacts on land use and biodiversity in the procurement region.

Modeling the impacts of wood pellet demand on forest dynamics in southeastern United States

AbstractThe export of wood pellets from the southeastern United States (USA) has grown significantly in recent years, following rising demand from Europe. Increased wood pellet demand could lead to spatially variable changes in timberland management and area in the USA. This study presents an assessment of the impacts of increasing wood pellet demand (an additional 11.6 Mt by 2030) on land‐use dynamics, taking into account developments in other wood product markets as well as expected changes in other land uses. An economic model for the forest sector of the southeastern USA (SRTS) was linked to a land‐use change model (PLUC) to identify potential locations of land‐use change following scenarios of demand for pellets and other wood products. Projections show that in the absence of additional demand for wood pellets, natural timberland area is projected to decline by 450–15 000 km2by 2030, mainly through urbanization and pine plantation establishment. Under the high wood pellet demand scenario, more (2000–7500 km2) natural timberland area is retained and more (8000–20 000 km2) pine plantation is established. Shifts from natural timberland to pine plantation occur predominantly in the Atlantic coastal region. Future work will assess the impact of projected transitions in natural timberland and pine plantations on biodiversity and carbon storage. This modeling framework can be applied for multiple scenarios and land‐use projections to identify locations of timberland area changes for the whole southeastern USA, thereby informing the debate about potential impacts of wood pellet demand on land‐use dynamics and environmental services. © 2017 The Authors.Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefiningpublished by Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Use of a participatory approach to develop a regional assessment tool for bioenergy production

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in certification schemes and sustainability assessment tools for bioenergy, however these mechanisms are often too generic, numerous and too broad for regional or local level implementation. Furthermore, these assessments are often weighted toward economic and environmental sustainability with less focus on social, cultural and institutional factors. This study was intended to overcome these limitations. We developed a community-driven regional assessment tool for forest-based bioenergy production in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (USA). Stakeholders representing local landowners, farmers, township supervisors, timberland management companies, venture capitalists, government organizations and local interest groups generated a preliminary list of criteria and indicators (C&I) in a series of focus groups and interviews, and narrowed the list using multiple criteria analysis (MCA) in a workshop. Participants ranked environmental protection as the most important and relevant sustainability criteria, although policy and governance, and institutional capacity were also weighted highly. The final set of C&I consisted of 17 criteria and 31 indicators (in parentheses): Economic (6), Environmental (7), Social (8), Policy and regulations (4) and Institutional capacity (6). This set reflected the general balance across sustainability principles valued by the stakeholders. While expert-developed sustainability assessments are routinely biased toward easily quantifiable indicators, the indicators that were considered important and relevant by our participants included both quantitative as well as qualitative indicators, in almost equal proportions. This participatory MCA method identified criteria and indicators that reflect the regional context and the concerns of local stakeholders, and data for many of these indicators are readily available.

Comparing the financial performance of timber REITs and other REITs

The return and risk characteristics of three types of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the United States are evaluated by the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model. The three types of REITs are timber REITs, which focus on timberland management; specialized REITs, which focus on properties that are specialized in a single use; and common REITs, which consist of all REITs except specialized REITs. Results from the intertemporal CAPM demonstrate that REITs behave like procyclical small and value stocks. Results from multivariate GARCH model show that the conditional volatilities of REITs rise more after good news and REITs as a whole respond positively to past shocks. Despite being a part of specialized REITs, timber REITs have large market capitalizations and no excess returns, and are insensitive to recessionary shocks. Timber REITs have the smallest unconditional variance and are most vulnerable to idiosyncratic shocks.

The value of adaption: Climate change and timberland management

Adaptation to exogenous change occurs on both intensive and extensive margins. Whether and how one accounts for human adaptation directly affects estimates of the economic consequences of environmental change, estimates that are both critical in informing policy decisions and notoriously difficult to value. This paper introduces and applies an analytical framework for placing an economic value on adaptation. We explore the issue first in a stylized model that facilitates making concrete generalizations about the kinds of adaptations that generate high or low economic value. We then test the soundness of our insights by incorporating learning and adaptive decision-making into a structural dynamic forestry model where climate change is imposed exogenously and agents respond optimally. Using downscaled climate projections integrated with site- and species-specific timber productivity data, we estimate the economic value of adaptation to climate change within the California timber industry. We find on the intensive margin, changing the rotation intervals will yield a low value of adaptation, but on the extensive margin, replanting more suitable tree species can yield significant value.

Modeling and forecasting pine sawtimber stumpage prices in the US South by various time series models

Among the three timberland return drivers (biological growth, timber price, and land price), timber price remains the most unpredictable. It affects not only periodic dividends from timber sales but also timber production strategies embedded in timberland management. Using various time series techniques, this study aimed to model and forecast real pine sawtimber stumpage prices in 12 southern timber regions in the United States. Under the discrete-time framework, the univariate autoregressive integrated moving average model was established as a benchmark, whereas other multivariate time series methods were applied in comparison. Under the continuous-time framework, both the geometric Brownian motion and the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process were fitted. The results revealed that (i) the vector autoregressive model forecasted more accurately in the 1-year period by the mean absolute percentage error criterion, (ii) seven out of the 12 southern timber regions played dominant roles in the long-run equilibrium, and (iii) conditional variances and covariances from the bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model well captured market risks.

Public land, timber harvests, and climate mitigation: Quantifying carbon sequestration potential on U.S. public timberlands

Scientists and policy makers have long recognized the role that forests can play in countering the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide (CO 2), a greenhouse gas (GHG). In the United States, terrestrial carbon sequestration in private and public forests offsets approximately 11% of all GHG emissions from all sectors of the economy on an annual basis. Although much of the attention on forest carbon sequestration strategy in the United States has been on the role of private lands, public forests in the United States represent approximately 20% of the U.S. timberland area and also hold a significantly large share (30%) of the U.S. timber volume. With such a large standing timber inventory, these forested lands have considerable impact on the U.S. forest carbon balance. To help decision makers understand the carbon implications of potential changes in public timberland management, we compared a baseline timber harvest scenario with two alternative harvest scenarios and estimated annual carbon stock changes associated with each. Our analysis found that a “no timber harvest” scenario eliminating harvests on public lands would result in an annual increase of 17–29 million metric tonnes of carbon (MMTC) per year between 2010 and 2050—as much as a 43% increase over current sequestration levels on public timberlands and would offset up to 1.5% of total U.S. GHG emissions. In contrast, moving to a more intense harvesting policy similar to that which prevailed in the 1980s may result in annual carbon losses of 27–35 MMTC per year between 2010 and 2050. These losses would represent a significant decline (50–80%) in anticipated carbon sequestration associated with the existing timber harvest policies. If carbon sequestration were valued in the marketplace as part of a GHG offset program, the economic value of sequestered carbon on public lands could be substantial relative to timber harvest revenues.

Carbon fluxes resulting from U.S. private timberland management

A carbon budget model was developed to examine the effects of forest management practices on carbon storage in U.S. private timberlands. The model explicitly incorporates the demand for wood products and its impact on harvesting and other management decisions. Forest carbon is divided into four components: carbon stored in trees, soils, forest litter, and understory vegetation. Changes in the forest carbon inventory result from tree growth and management activities, in particular harvesting. Harvesting of timber for wood products is determined by demand and supply forces. The model then tracks carbon in timber removals through primary and secondary processing and disposal stages. Harvesting also has effects on carbon in soils, forest litter, and understory vegetation. A base-run scenario projects increases in carbon storage in U.S. private timberlands by 2040; however, this increase is offset by carbon emissions resulting from harvesting.

Regeneration Following Harvest on Nonindusrial Private Pine Sites in the South: A Diffusion of Innovations Perspective

Abstract The "diffusion of innovations" model is used to explain differences between nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners who regenerated their pine stands following harvest and those who did not. It describes how new technologies and practices (regeneration in this case) are adopted by members of a social system. Differences between regenerators and nonregenerators are explained in terms of socioeconomic characteristics, personality variables, and communication behavior. The mass media are the most efficient means to reach NIPF owners, but foresters may have to employ personal contacts or individual mailings to affect NIPF regeneration decisions. Noneconomic models of NIPF landowner behavior can expand our understanding of the forces that shape NIPF timberland management practices. South. J. Appl. For. 11(1):37-41.