Research Staff working on Sitka spruce nat regen
Photograph courtesy of John McNeill, Kirkcudbright.
Silviculture Research Branch staff thinning out natural regenerating Sitka spruce in the Forest of Ae in 1974. From the left they are James White, Bill Carruthers and John McNeill.
In some locations after clear felling and also following the 1968 windblow the prolific regeneration of Sitka spruce was exciting some attention particularly as it was growing at several hundred to the square metre! The concern was the growth of an impenetrable mass of stems, none of which would reach any significant size and these would be mixed in with standing dead suppressed stems which would render harvesting uneconomic and unproductive as far as quality structural timber was concerned.
Much experimental and forest operational work was carried out in cutting out alleyways through the mass and trying to single out the best trees at roughly 2 metre spacing. The operations were carried out with clearing saws as seen here, tractor mounted cutters and also a little with herbicides.
Strangely, I had occasion to visit this site in 2005 to check out an experiment where plots of the thickly regenerating spruce was thinned out as above, some plots were chemically thinned and also some plots untreated and left growing as they were. Unfortunately more than half of the area had suffered from windblow and had been harvested but there were just enough of the three treatments left for me to conclude that the untreated plot had as good quality timber and trees at ideal spacing as the plots which had been treated. It seemed that nature had sorted the crop out well for foresters needs without the requirement of expensive operations
Groups: Forest Research, Forestry Areas, Forestry in Action, Groups of people