Kim Steiner designed the oak regeneration study that has been under way since 1996. As a result of the research, scientists are beginning to understand why oaks are not regenerating.

The rapid rise in value for high-quality hardwood, specifically black cherry, caused timber revenues to rise from $8 million per year in 1989 to more than $35 million in 2003. “Ten percent of the higher value allowed DCNR to pay for research, and Bureau of Forestry officials started to make decisions about how to improve regeneration of the forests,” says forest scientist James Finley. “They weren’t sure what would be successful.”

With funding from DCNR, forest biologist Kim Steiner and colleagues in the School of Forest Resources began a longitudinal study of stand development on state forestlands within the central third of the Commonwealth. “The smallest research tract is 13 acres, the largest is 225 acres,” says Steiner. “Some tracts are fenced to exclude deer, some are not, and they differ in a few other important ways. But all are harvested soon after we begin measuring, so the study spans both the old and the new developing stands. Even in forestry, most research projects are short term, but trees and forests often take decades to register responses to treatments and changing conditions. This study aims to fill a critical hole in our understanding of the long-term trajectory of forest stand development.

Jim Finley inspects a deer exclusion fence erected around a research plot in the oak-regeneration study.

“We are currently monitoring the development of 70 forest stands, and our data begin with conditions of the previous mature stand and continue at three-year intervals with characteristics of the new developing stand,” adds Steiner. “All of our several thousand plots are permanently marked and can be relocated exactly with global positioning system instruments. Our rather comprehensive data set will be valuable for decades after we are gone, but already we have used it to develop innovative models of the early regeneration process. We are debunking some of the conventional ideas about regeneration in oak stands that arose from earlier studies of more limited scope.”

Students take most of the measurements, and several master’s and doctoral students have done their graduate research as part of the project. “But students are not just minions who collect data,” Finley points out. “We want them to be thinking about what they are doing because they are the ones who see these stands most intimately. We want them writing and advising us. One of the things we stress to the students is that every piece of data is important. We try to hand-pick our students, and they learn well. We are very proud of the number of them that have gone on to graduate degrees at other institutions.”