The data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach has been widely applied to measure the relative efficiencies of decision making units (DMUs) for a time period. This article measures the performance improvement of a DMU at two time points by using the DEA approach. Two ideas are proposed. One is to treat one DMU at two time points as two different DMUs, and the ratio of the efficiency scores of a DMU at two time points serves as a...

The purpose of a dendrometer is to measure tree diameter. Contact and noncontact dendrometers accomplish this task by collecting different metrics, including girth or distance between tangent points on a tree stem. Many dendrometers have been developed in the last quarter century and many have been retired. This article summarizes instrument developments and application results, contains an interpretation of the results, and p...

In this article, we conduct a productive efficiency analysis using the two major methods: stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). First, we demonstrate the steps and assumptions involved in SFA and DEA, and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Then we apply them to the case of bleached softwood kraft pulp production to derive technical and allocative efficiency measures for 102 mills in the...

The interest in ecologically meaningful information from forest inventories is increasing. Forest area and its characteristics of spatial distribution are among this information. This paper describes a technique for deriving some metrics of forest spatial pattern from nonmapped forest inventory samples. The technique is developed for clusters of subplots, though applicable also for other plot types. It evaluates the area of th...

An eight-input translog total cost function was estimated, and the estimates were used to calculate Allen and Morishima substitution elasticities, price elasticities of conditional input demands, elasticity of size, and technical change for Norwegian sawmilling at a five-digit disaggregate industry level, based on an unbalanced panel of 3,090 individual observations of sawmills over the period 1974–1991. The unusually rich sou...

We infer baseline response to climate of the growth of trees in California dendroclimatological samples, adopting linear and nonlinear approaches and using the expected accumulated impact of a state change as one measure of persistence. Many samples exhibit two quite distinct growth states. Timing of high and low growth states is highly heterogeneous across locations, and regional aggregation seriously understates the size and...

Increased emphasis on sustainable resource management in forestry has effectuated a demand for various nontimber values. Nonconsumptive wildlife recreation is an important nontimber service produced on forest and rangeland. Travel cost models and data from the 1991 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation are used to estimate the demand and value for nonconsumptive wildlife-associated recreation i...

The existence of a relatively long (ca. 40 yr) satellite imagery archive for examination of potential worldwide forest change motivated an inspection of the relation between forest features observable from higher resolution airborne and satellite imagery and measures of forest biomass, height, and age. Using these data, we inspected the relation between stand age, mean diameter, height, and standing aboveground biomass for for...

Cubic-meter volumes estimated from simple and complex proxy taper functions were compared to observed volumes of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda, L.) and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa, Dougl. ex Laws.) trees to evaluate accuracy (bias and precision) in the centroid method. The results of this investigation showed no clear evidence that a more complex proxy taper function is more accurate than a simple function. The results also s...

Carbon compound concentrations in plant tissues depend on the environment in which plants grow. However, little is known about how these concentrations vary across a range of forest environmental conditions. Our study examined root tissue (phloem, cambium, phellum, and phello-derm) collected from naturally regenerated mature Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca [Bessn.] Franco) trees in eight stands on three habitat...

Six alternative ways of reforesting degraded lands in Puerto Rico were evaluated using emergy (spelled with an “m”). Emergy and its economic equivalent, emdollars, put the contributions of environmental work and human services on a comparable basis. This article shows the emergy method for evaluating forest contributions to public benefit and its use to select alternatives for reforestation. Emdollar values were compared for s...

The objective of this experiment was to study genotypic stability for growth and biomass traits recorded in treatments with optimal and limiting water availability at two different temperatures and to study how the different growth environments affected genetic parameter estimates. Open-pollinated families of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) were collected in 2 seed orchards with 28 and 35 families respectively and cultivated...

Loblolly pine seed were inoculated at sowing with one of four plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) strains at four different rates both in the nursery and in the greenhouse. Seedlings were harvested at 4, 8, and 12 wk after sowing in the greenhouse and at 5, 10, and 15 wk after sowing in the nursery. Ectomycorrhizae colonization, estimated as the total number ectomycorrhizal roots per seedling and averaging by gram root...

Three types of adjacency constraint formulations—pairwise, Type I ND (nondominated), and NOAM (new ordinary adjacency matrix)—were compared on 900 hypothetical, randomly generated, spatially explicit forest management problems with between 50 and 350 stands. Forests were generated using four age-class distributions, nominally called immature, regulated, overmature, and old-growth. Management planning problems with adjacency co...

The diameter distribution of the growing stock is an essential starting point in many forest management planning problems. There are several methods for predicting the diameter distribution of a stand, varying from methods which utilize theoretical distribution functions to nonparametric methods. Usually the predicted diameter distribution is scaled so that the stem number corresponds to the measured value. However, if stem nu...

Aggregate timber supply by ownership was investigated for a small region by applying stand-level harvest choice models to a representative sample of stands and then aggregating to regional totals using the area-frame of the forest survey. Timber harvest choices were estimated as probit models for three ownership categories in coastal plain southern pine stands of North Carolina using individual permanent and remeasured stand-l...

Predictions of future forestland area are an important component of forest policy analyses. In this article, we test the ability of econometric land use models to accurately forecast forest area. We construct a panel data set for Alabama consisting of county and time-series observation for the period 1964 to 1992. We estimate models using restricted data sets—namely, data from early periods—and use out-of-sample values of depe...

The ecological and economic impacts of individual forest pathogens on forest stands are often difficult to measure because of indirect impacts arising from their interactions with other agents. Root diseases especially interact with many elements of the forest. This study uses a method called path analysis to estimate direct and indirect effects of Armillaria root disease and other small-scale disturbances on a pristine Pinus...

This article examines underlying factors shaping lay perceptions, and differences between lay and expert perceptions, of the ecological risks to water environments associated with six forest industry activities. A survey was administered to 183 lay subjects in four communities within the Lower Fraser Basin of western Canada. Parts of the survey were also administered to 16 aquatic science professionals. The results show that b...

Four small (< 13.5 ha), upland, hardwood watersheds were selected for a study of the changes in water dynamics and associated chemical changes as water moves through various components of the ecosystem. These watersheds were also used to determine what changes in water movement and chemistry are related to silvicultural treatments of conversion to pine, a shelterwood cut or a clearcut applied 6 yr earlier. A fourth watershed s...

The relationship between quadratic mean diameter and tree density appeared curvilinear on a log–log scale, based on data from direct-seeded slash pine (Pinus elliottii var. elliottii Engelm.) stands. The self-thinning trajectory followed a straight line for high tree density levels and then turned away from this line as tree density decreased. A system of equations was developed to model the reciprocal effects of stand diamete...

Prescribed burning has, in the past decade, become the focus of debate among policy makers, federal and private land managers, and the public. To manage fire effectively, the USDA Forest Service has formally recognized the need for economic analysis. It is stated in the Federal Wildland Fire Policy of 1995 that fire management alternatives will be based on science and sound ecological and economic principles. This article brie...

Social scientists have long attempted to understand change in natural resource-dependent communities. This article examines the relationship of three alternative “engines of change”: local resource production, local historical events, and broad societal trends. Regression models were used to examine the relationships between four dimensions of community social change (size, structure, cohesion, and anomie) and the alternative...

The uneven-aged management problem is to determine the management regime for an existing stand over an infinite time horizon, without ever clearcutting it. A new solution method to solve this problem is presented and demonstrated on simulated Norway spruce stands with different initial stand structures. Diameter distributions were used as a convenient way to describe these structures. The method, which puts much effort into de...

This article explores spatial optimization approaches to fire (and possibly fuel) management problems, with a timing-oriented model formulation. The relevant land area is divided into cells, and the ignition time of “protection areas” (such as towns, homes, and campgrounds) is delayed as much as possible through spatial application of treatments that have the effect of slowing the fire front movement through each cell. Model v...