Restocking experiment at Ae Forest
Photograph is courtesy and copyright of Forestry Commission, Forest Research, Roslin, and provided with help from Glen Brearley. FR Photo number No B4716 taken by I A Anderson.
The site of Expt32.P62 Ae where clearfell brash, lop and top was pulverised by Wilder- Rainthorpe chopper in double runs over the same row. The main image shows the level of brash before work started. Is that Andy Neustein standing there?
The PDF first image shows the site after the treatment as smooth as a ------- well perhaps not! The second image is the site mounded and planted with Sitka spruce. Not sure how the mounds were created but there is a suggestion of a hole on the left which could be from a digger bucket. The third image is that of a Western hemlock young tree planted directly into the brash pulverised ground.
It may be the case that this experiment compared the growth response of two species of trees on clearfell sites with pulverised brash, brash cleared and not cleared when trees were directly planted into the ground and also onto mounds. A very important experiment with significant outcomes that swung the effort of future restocking toward the use of mounding on wetter gley and peaty sites.
Please see Record No 3777 for another view of this Expt
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This experiment was designed to look at the effect of 4 different sizes of felling area (0.1, 0.3, and 1 acre with 10 acres simulating clear felling) upon the stability and regeneration of spruce stands in the Borders. I would think this is probably the 0.3 acre size. Some of the results are contained in a report by Andy Neustein from 1964 (see Neustein, SA 1964 Windthrow on the margins of different sizes of felling area. Report on Forest Research, pp 166-171, HMSO , London). Judging from the file, you are right in assuming that the Wilder Rainthorpe was used to dispose of the brash, but the mounds were formed by hand (by Research staff – took 816 man hours according to the file!) to ensure compatibility with what was done in establishing the first rotation crop. File notes suggest that the mounds were satisfactory and easy to cut wherever there was adequate peat depth, but with shallow or no peat they tended to crumble and fall apart. Comment left on 07 March 2018 at 16:54 by Norman Davidson