Sneak Peek: The Forestry Source, December 

November 20, 2018

Next month’s edition of The Forestry Source will soon be hitting your mailboxes, but we wanted to offer a special sneak peek of the variety of articles coming up. Enjoy!

Hurricane Michael Takes Swath of Timber in Florida, Georgia
Hurricane Michael caused widespread severe damage to timber in Florida and Georgia. On October 19, the Florida Forest Service released a preliminary estimate that timber on more than 2.8 million acres was damaged, about half of which was classified as catastrophic or severe.

“We feel that the assessment of $1.3 billion in damage to timber is really relatively conservative,” Jim Karels, Florida’s state forester. “It went right through one of the big timber belts in Florida, and the wind speeds were still tracking at Cat 4 as it went into Georgia. It hit a lot of big timber, and it had the most impact on the big timber. Instead of blowing trees over, the Cat 4 winds broke them off at about 15 feet, plus or minus, which makes it even worse. Essentially, the first two logs are wasted because of the wind shake and the break.”

Wind shake, or the cracking and splitting of tree boles, occurs when trees bend severely before they break, making the wood useless for milling into lumber.

“It looked like somebody took a big Weed Eater 50 or 60 miles wide and off they went, about 15 feet off of the ground. Some stands of peeler logs and pole timber are just stubs as far as you can see,” Karels said. “In Florida, there are about 72 million tons on the ground. That equates to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 million log trucks worth of wood. This storm put four times the amount of wood that we cut annually on the ground—four years’ worth in one day.”

The CIF’s Dana Collins
The Forestry Source associate editor interviews Dana Collins, executive director of the Canadian Institute of Forestry (CIF). CIF’s mission is to “serve as the voice of forest practitioners representing foresters, forest technologists and technicians, ecologists, biologists, educators and many others with a professional interest in forestry.”
 
Meet the Diversity Scholars
The Diversity Scholarship and Diversity Ambassador Programs are two ways SAF is striving to actualize its Diversity and Inclusion Policy Statement and support individuals who are vital to the future of our profession. Among the program’s goals are to encourage inclusion by connecting passionate young people interested in natural resources with leaders in SAF and to enable the ideas of the diversity scholars to be heard. This year, 10 students were selected from a pool of 70 applicants from 36 colleges and universities. 
 
More Scenes from the Convention
Nine photographs from the 2018 National Convention, including: the members of Southern University’s student SAF chapter; a scene from an excursion by student SAF members to Oregon State University; and Grant Canary, CEO of DroneSeed, with an unmanned aerial vehicle during his presentation, “Using UAVs to Conduct Surveying, Herbicide Applications, and Aerial Seed Deployment.” 
 
The Great Forestry Read
Brief reviews of Ecological Forest Management, by Jerry F. Franklin, K. Norman Johnson, and Debora L. Johnson; River of Fire: The Rattlesnake Fire and the Mission Boys, by John N. Maclean, Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, by Edward Struzik; and Careers in Forest, Wildlife, Fisheries, and Range Resources, by Ron Boldenow.