Benmore Forestry students measuring trees
This one of a set of images from photocopier scans and is courtesy of the staff at Glenbranter Forest Office.
Little was known of the details of people apart from a couple of names written on one of the images but one former student Bob Boyd has been tracked down to Northern Ireland and has provided the following information:
‘‘This photo was taken in a larch stand on the west side of Loch Eck between the forest road to Bernice and Loch Eck, about half mile or so along from Benmore. It is near to the new water treatment plant currently sited on the loch shore. I believe this would have been a mensuration exercise, the student using the tape to measure diameter at breast height is Bob Cuthbertson and I am the one recording it, we were both 1958/60 students. I think this larch stand is still growing there.’’
As Bob says the exercise would probably have been to calculate the volume of trees in the stand or per area of one acre or a fixed sized plot. (trees are not marked and so not indicating follow up harvesting operations) . There was a strict code of procedure to ensure that the measurement process was as accurate and unbiased as possible - all designed to ensure that any buyer of the trees had confidence in the total volume estimate and the volume categories.
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Groups: Forester Training Schools and Universities, Forestry in Action