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Appendix A Pioneer Forest: A Case Study in Modern Selective Forest Management Gifford Pinchot would be delighted. The German school of select-cut forestry and uneven age timber management that informed Pinchot and a couple of generations of American foresters is alive and well. It has continued and become even further refined on approximately 154,000 acres of forestlands in the Missouri Ozarks.1 The visionary behind the Pioneer Forest is Leo A. Drey, born in St. Louis in 1917. In 1951 Drey bought around 30,000 acres on the advice that this was the minimal acreage he needed to sustain an economically viable private forest . In only a few years, however, Drey expanded his holdings to become the largest private landowner in the state. The eastern Missouri Ozarks were famous for their white oak trees, and a number of enterprises harvested this wood for barrel staves, particularly for storing and shipping bourbon whiskey. Pioneer Cooperage Company, and later National Distillers Company, concentrated their efforts on tens of thousands of acres mainly in Shannon, Reynolds, and Carter counties. In 1954 Drey purchased some 90,000 acres from National Distillers. As he has said many times, he has been in “over his head” ever since. The Pioneer’s staff has remained around half a dozen people. In 1956 a general manager, forester, and three rangers ran the operation. In the 1990s the staff consisted of a chief forester, biologist, forest manager, and three ranger-technicians. National Distillers, Drey explained, had very superior timber management practices. According to Drey, “The two people in charge, Ed Woods and Charlie Kirk, were really recognized as being preeminent in the field of foresters. They’d been at it a long time. They’re the ones who established the model that we’re still following, this individual tree selection.” Woods and Kirk, of course, came out of the earlier school of forestry then focused on selective cutting. Other professional foresters predicted that a maple forest would come to dominate the area, since hypothetically the absence of direct sunlight afforded by a clear-cut would encourage shade-tolerant maples. “Of course, we’ve been at that for almost fifty years,” Drey observed wryly, “and 194 j Appendix A demonstrated that you can regenerate an oak forest. And we have generated an oak forest through individual tree selection.” So just as silviculturists nationally were turning away from selective cutting to clear-cutting, the self-described “bullheaded” Drey began his operation adamantly opposed to clear-cutting. It is a direction from which he never departed, and now, more than half a century later, the Pioneer Forest’s continued profitability and environmental stewardship has vindicated his original vision. The Pioneer Forest now contains two research natural areas (as defined by the Society of American Foresters); one comprised of white oak, another of old growth eastern red cedar. Finally, the forest has a number of “forest reserves” that Drey and staff decided needed protection, even if they did not meet the standards for a research natural area. Forest reserves “mainly revolve around unique plant communities that we wanted to protect at some level, but that are not something that’s unique enough to put into a natural area,” said forest manager Clint Trammel, who began working for the Pioneer Forest in 1970. Trammel stressed that these areas might qualify for research natural areas in the future. Such forest reserves might be situated around damp fens that support a distinct ecology. “Our logging activities are designed so that we don’t impact those,” Trammel explained. “We’ll stay far enough back away from them that we don’t change the water regime on those sites.” Another forest reserve includes an old stand of white oak and hickory. The older hickory, in particular, is unusual for the area, so the Pioneer Forest staff decided to leave it alone to see what would naturally evolve. Trammel gets a little peeved at the overwhelming predominance of evenage timber management in the United States. “We have enough research on even-age management that we could probably fill ten warehouses. But we probably could not cover the top of a conference table with the research that’s been done on uneven-age management in oak-hickory.” Trammel said his research , including a master’s thesis for University of Missouri, has revealed remarkably similar economic returns from even- and uneven-age management. “So you can’t justify doing even-age management because of the economic returns. You have...

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