Topic: Silvics and Silviculture

[Astronuc]

An increasingly important environmental science is silviculture.

http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/forestry/silvics.htm

Forestry is a science. One of the most important of the many disciplines in forestry is silviculture. Silviculture is the agriculture of trees--how to grow them, how to maximize growth and return, and how to manipulate tree species compositions to meet landowner objectives.
To understand silviculture, one must first understand silvics. Silvics involves understanding how trees grow, reproduce, and respond to environmental changes. Here is a quick lesson on silvics.
Some tree species thrive in shade--sugar maple, beech, hemlock, dogwood, red maple, and basswood are good examples. These species can live, grow, and reproduce in shade and semishade conditions. Many tree species prefer or require full sunlight--yellow-popular, walnut, some oaks, black cherry, yellow pine, and hickory are good examples. These species require full sunlight to reproduce, after which they grow best in full sunlight or as part of the overstory canopy of the forest. They also tend to be the fastest-growing species and, to a great extent, the most valuable species. Still other species such as white pine, white ash, and some oaks, elm, and birch are intermediate in their sunlight requirements. You may have noticed these patterns in the woods. Normally, large overstory trees are oaks and poplar while seedling and sapling composition is generally maple, beech, and other oaks.
Silvics also is concerned with seeding requirements, elevation, and location. Different species will show up in different areas, on different soils, and at different elevations. If this sounds like ecology, then it can be stated accurately that silvics is the ecology of the forest.
Silviculture involves managing and handling the forest in view of its silvics.

http://oak.snr.missouri.edu/silviculture/
Silvics of North America
http://na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/silvics_manual/table_of_contents.htm
http://www.yale.edu/silvics/

Silviculture has been variously defined as the art and science of producing and tending a forest; the application of knowledge of silvics in the treatment of a forest; or the theory and practice of controlling forest establishment, composition, and growth. Since silvicultural practice is applied forest ecology, it is the biological technology for forests and woodlands that carries ecosystem management into action. Like the rest of forestry itself, silviculture is an applied science that rests on the more fundamental natural and social sciences. The immediate foundation of silviculture is silvics, which deals with the growth and development of trees and other forest biota as well as of the whole forest ecosystem.
Silviculture is designed to create and maintain the kind of forest that will best fulfill the objectives of the owner and the governing society. The production of wood (timbers, fiber, fuelwood), though the most common objective, is neither the only nor necessarily the dominant one. It is a mistake for foresters to assume that timber production is or should be the sole objective of silviculture. Frequently, especially with public forests, such benefits as water, wildlife, grazing, recreation, or aesthetics may be important; water and wildlife always have to be taken into account.
Silviculture is the oldest conscious application of the science of ecology and is a field recognized before the term ecology was coined. Many ways of governing the development of forest stands rest heavily on cuttings and other treatments that alter or modify the factors of the stand environment that regulate the growth of the vegetation.