In this thesis I examine the question: can allowing a wildfire to burn this year result in a net positive economic gain? To answer this question I created 2,500 multiple sets of paired scenarios (called a fire of interest) which consist of ignitions, vegetation growth, and timber harvest over the...
Small landowners in the state of Oregon find it difficult to be competitive with larger companies to provide traditional forest products to consumers. Additionally, many landowners hope to be profitable from their land, but are not necessarily interested in or have the capability to harvest large tracts of timber. Specialty...
Wildfire exclusion over the past century or more has resulted in extensive fuel accumulations throughout much of the West that combined with recent climatic patterns have increased the frequency of relatively uncommon, large, high-severity wildfires. Forest restoration treatments intended to alter landscape-level fire disturbance patterns can be difficult to implement...
Changes in federal forest management, enactment of environmental policies, recessions and a shift to a global economy dramatically impacted counties between the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, counties began experiencing a shift away from traditional natural resource extraction activities – amidst changing demographics resulting from rural restructuring taking place...
Contract harvest operations have become the preferred approach to reducing the largest cost component of timber production through free market competition amongst logging contractors bidding or negotiating for work. The goal of this research was to investigate economic components of harvesting operations not previously studied for steep slope thinning harvests...
Numerous development projects are implemented in developing countries to attain economic and ecological development. However, in most cases, the encouraging results observed during the implementation phase terminated with the project period, raising concerns on these projects' sustainability after the project period has ended. This study focuses on this sustainability issue...
This study considered regional forest policies for sequestering carbon in existing
forests in western Oregon. A model of log markets in western Oregon was employed to
examine the impacts of forest policy changes on future carbon stock, harvests, and
management activities. A carbon tax program, as a mitigation option for...
Recent catastrophic wildfires have forced the forest management community to develop new strategies for reducing forest fuels. Tightly spaced understory trees often create a fire ladder allowing surface fires to encroach into the crowns of overstory trees. This situation can lead to intensive, catastrophic, stand-replacement forest fires. Mechanical removal or...
Harvesting productivity rates and costs were determined for three
silvicultural treatments used in commercial ground-based thinning of
young stands to achieve timber management objectives and enhance
wildlife habitat. Treatment definitions were based on residual trees
per acre (tpa) after thinning. The treatments were light thin (115
residual tpa), light thin...
Young Douglas-fir stands were commercially thinned to achieve vegetation- and wildlife-related objectives. Harvesting and forwarding production and costs were compared among three mechanized thinning treatments: light thin [(115 residual trees per acre (tpa)], light thin with 0.5-ac openings (92 residual tpa), and heavy thin (53 residual tpa). The sites were...