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Forestry

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  • A broad definition of forestry would be the study of trees, forests, and their use by people. Modern science-based forestry is thought to have begun in the nineteenth century when Europeans looked to specialists to address questions of wood supply and extraction both in their forests at home and in their colonies. The threat of forest loss and wood scarcity resulted in concern for increased forest growth and management techniques for improved yield. By 1891 the United States had established publicly owned forest reserves. In 1900 the Society of American Foresters was established, as was the first School of Forestry in North American at Yale University. The U.S. Forest Service was formed three years later, and this combination of professional, scholarly, and governmental resources constitute the core of U.S. forestry research today. Since the mid-1940s the scope of forestry has grown in response to economics, demography, politics, and social change as well as developments in related fields of study. While at one time German was the primary language of forestry, since World War II most research is reported in English. Knowledge of inter-national research and practices has grown in importance since the 1980s. In addressing global forest concerns, international and local researchers have begun to discover reservoirs of indigenous knowledge concerning forests and their use. Modern forestry education has a tradition of integrating concepts from a variety of disciplines and creating new specialties. These include forest genet-ics, forest ecology, forest recreation, forest economics, forest engineering, urban forestry, plantation forestry, forest pathology, and wood science. The questions addressed by forestry are often interdisciplinary or require a deep understanding of a complementary discipline. As a result, a forest science collection will not be useful in isolation from access to sound collections in the natural, environ-mental, and agricultural sciences. Likewise, a wood science or forest engineer-ing collection will rely on user access to collections in the physical sciences and civil, mechanical, and chemical engineering. Finally, to address the interaction of humans and forest resources, whether looking at income generation, recreational use, traditional knowledge and practices, or conservation strategies, a forestry researcher will need access to collections in the social sciences. Given these assumptions about access to other collections, we can define a distinct serial literature for forestry. It is defined by the history of forestry and as a result is composed largely of government document series, international, and nongovernmental organization reports as well as trade, scholarly professional, and, more recently, scholarly commercial journals. The selected list of periodicals included here does not include government publications, although these are an important source of technical as well as scientific information. Governmental agencies such as the regional research and experiment stations of the U.S. Forest Service are vital sources of information on all aspects of forestry. Series titles such as the regional General Technical Reports are numerous. They are now published electronically in full-text and are available from the Forest Service web site. Canadian libraries will benefit from their easy access to this literature and that of the National Research Council of Canada's many serial publications. Although they are important sources of information, statistical series and serials available from nongovernmental, nonprofit international organizations and research institutions have not been included in this listing. Several statistical series and The State of the World's Forests are available as searchable datasets and in full-text online from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forestry Sector web site. There are numerous serial publications now available via the Internet from other nongovernmental, nonprofit agencies. These are particularly important for coverage of international forestry. The FAO Forestry Sector web site will help identify and serve as a portal to many of these resources as will the AgNIC Forestry web site. The selection of scholarly, academic, and trade journals is primarily representative and by no means exhaustive. Added to the list of forestry titles with this edition are Agroforestry Systems and International Review of Forestry as representative titles for international forestry, as well as Forest Policy and Economics and the JAWA Journal. Deleted from the list is Forestry Source because the nonmember highlights are now available from the Society of American Foresters web site. In reviewing the periodicals from the 11th edition and considering new titles, I looked for titles widely held by other libraries. In 2001, faculty members in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University were asked to list their most used or top ten journals. This listing provided me with evidence of the multidisciplinary underpinnings of forestry and new titles for consideration. In assessing scholarly titles, I looked for titles with high impact factors or a high journal citation half-life using the Journal Citation Reports from the Institute for Scientific Information. When deciding between comparable titles I took into consideration the journal subscription price, and gave preference to professional society publications over journals from commercial publishers. In the earlier editions of this section, Carol C. Green of the University of Washington has recommended using Literature of Forestry and Agroforestry, published by Cornell University Press in 1996.1 would like to acknowledge that I too have made use of this bibliography and reiterate its importance to anyone managing a forestry collection. In addition to giving a useful history of forestry, it identifies both monographs and serials that have provided the foundation for science-based forestry.
  • Posted by permission of Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA). (c) CSA 2004. All rights reserved.
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  • Magazines for Libraries. 12th ed. pp. 493-499
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  • 0000-0914

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