Dissertation

Pine Plantation Forestry: Prioritizing Ecosystem Services on North Carolina Game Lands

Levin, Benjamin Ross

2025

Overview

Planted pine forests play important roles in providing timber revenue and ecosystem services in the southeastern United States. Trade-offs between management objectives exist, but demonstrating quantitative links between forest stand characteristics and species-specific habitat quality requires models that are scaled appropriately. We identified 24 thinning regimes and 6 planting densities deemed suitable for increasing open-forest condition on loblolly pine plantations. With the identified thinning regimes as our guides, we developed 1,008 prescriptions and associated growth and yield tables for newly regenerated loblolly pine plantations aimed at increasing open-forest condition. We identified the combination of thinning regime and initial planting density that generated the highest mean open-forest habitat suitability index scores. Then, we updated the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission’s Woodstock model by replacing the original regenerated growth and yield tables with the growth and yield tables that generated the highest habitat suitability index scores. We ran both the original and updated Woodstock models for 100 years and determined that the updated growth and yield tables generated a higher total habitat suitability index score during the modeled horizon than the original growth and yield tables. Using the updated outputs, we developed a production possibilities frontier to demonstrate the tradeoffs between managing for species-specific habitat objectives and providing sustainable revenue generation. Ultimately, we provided additional evidence that thinning pine plantations often and to below 11.5 m2/ha (50 ft2/ac) is more advantageous for open forest associated wildlife species.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Climate Change / Ecology / Forestry / Herbicides / Plantations / Productivity / Trees
• ISBN: 9798297621701