OOS 18-4 - Improving efficiency of longleaf pine restoration on private lands

Wednesday, August 14, 2019: 2:30 PM
M100, Kentucky International Convention Center
Janaki R.R. Alavalapati, School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, AL and Andres Susaeta, School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
Background/Question/Methods

Forest landowners and policy makers play a critical role in influencing forest conservation and management practices to ensure sustainable production of timer and ecosystem services. Adoption of management practices, however, depend upon forest landowners’ objectives. For example, a landowner whose primary objective is to produce timber or forest biomass for energy markets might choose high density planting and intensive management at the expense of other non-timber benefits such as aesthetics, water conservation, and biodiversity. Landowners whose primary objective is non-timber benefits might choose forest management practices that are less intensive. Longleaf pine forests, one of the biologically rich/diverse ecosystems, once encompassed more than 90 million acres of the North American landscape are now reduced to less than 4 million acres. Policy makers and citizen groups are devoting increasing efforts to restore this ecosystem. Private forest landowners manage their longleaf pine forests primarily for a range of ecosystem services such as water and biodiversity along with timber. However, from efficiency perspective, very limited information is available if landowners are optimizing the join production of longleaf timber and ecosystem services on their lands. In the absence of such information, landowners may not be investing their inputs at their optimum levels in longleaf pine restoration. This paper employs a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) approach to estimate the efficiency in the joint production of timber and environmental services. We used FIA data from over 2000 longleaf pine plots in the US Southeast.

Results/Conclusions

Results indicate that the join production of timber and environmental services is currently not optimal. It is conceivable that management inputs may have negative impacts on the production of environmental services. Simulation results suggest that a series of management strategies will improve efficiency of longleaf pine restoration for these benefits. These strategies include timely use of prescribed burning, creation of open gaps, and targeting medium to high quality sites. Results also indicate that adoption of strategies such as reducing stand density or increasing timber productivity must be carefully evaluated from their concomitant effects on ecosystem services . We hope that results of this study will guide forest landowners make more informed decisions of longleaf restoration on their lands.