Stand Management Cooperative
The long-term future of forest industry in the Pacific Northwest depends in part on the productivity of the region's forests and on the choice of silviculturally sound and cost-effective management regimes. Large areas of plantations are being established and managed with intensive silviculture. Reliable projections of the results of possible alternative combinations of silvicultural practices are essential for realistic evaluation of forestry investments and for intelligent choices among management regimes.
The cost of establishing and maintaining long-term research on the scale necessary to build an adequate regional database and understanding is beyond the capabilities of any single organization. The mission can only be met through a cooperative effort of land owners, processors, research agencies, and universities. The Stand Management Cooperative (SMC) was formed to create the pool of funding, scientific talent, and long term continuity necessary to achieve the mission.
Mission
- The main objective of the SMC is to design, establish, and maintain a regional program of integrated research on various aspects of intensive stand management. Central to this objective is the need to provide a continuing source of consistent, high-quality data on the effects of management practices on several aspects of wood production: stand growth and yield, tree growth and yield, wood quality and product recovery.
- Stands that have received early stocking control are particularly important due to the regional scarcity of data from low-density stands. The primary mission of the SMC Silviculture Project from 1986 to 1990 has been to initiate field studies that cover those aspects of intensive stand management that are least well understood.
Products
We produce people with superior analytic skills and knowledge of forest systems: students who achieve their graduate degree through SMC go on to apply their skills in industry; local, state, and federal agencies; and at not-for-profit organizations; they help their organizations better achieve objectives with a firm knowledge of how and where wood is produced. For their graduate research projects, students leverage data from the SMC's ever-expanding database of measurements across 527 installations located in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. These installations are composed primarily of Douglas-fir and western hemlock with thousands of plots containing hundreds of thousands of trees measured repeatedly resulting in millions of records. Below is a list of students, their degree and its date, and the title of their thesis/dissertation.
| Name | Year | Degree | Chair | Title |
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Stand Management Cooperative
Box 352100 • Seattle, WA 98195