A Brief History of Forestry.. Fernow Bernhard Eduard
and much used Wartenberg planting dibble. At the same time (1840), Manteuffel devised the method known by his name of planting in mounds, which is especially applicable on wet soils.
It was not until 1840 that transplanting of yearling pines with naked roots became general. The widespread application of this latter system resulted in abandoning to a large extent mixed growth, and led to the establishment of pure pine forests, introducing thereby most intensively all the dangers incident to a clearing system and pure forest which are avoided by the mixed forest, namely, insects, frost and drought.
A practice of planting spruce in bunches, originally twelve to twenty plants in a bunch, had been in existence since 1780. This practice increased until 1850, and is still in use in the Harz mountains and in eastern Prussia, although the bunches have been reduced so as to contain only from three to five plants, the object of the bunching being to make sure that one or the other of the plants should live. Much discussion as to the merits of this method took place between the old masters, Cotta favoring the small bunches upon the basis of a successful plantation of his own, Hartig and Pfeil opposing it, but finally weakening. Since 1850, however, the practice of setting out single plants has become more general.
A reaction from the indiscriminate application of the shelterwood method to the hardwoods and of the clearing method to the pine set in during the last quarter of the 19th century under the lead of Burkhardt and Gayer. These advocated return to mixed forest and to natural regeneration with long periods, approaching a selection forest. Gayer especially, professor of silviculture at Munich, became the foremost apostle of this school. Yet even to this day, the principles of silvicultural treatment under the many different conditions remain unsettled. On the whole however, with the financial question assiduously brought forward, the clearing system has made most progress, and the selection system has nearly vanished, being replaced by the group method and the shelterwood system.
A number of special forms of silvicultural management applicable under special conditions have been locally developed, without, however, gaining much ground and being mainly of historical value. Among these may be mentioned Seebach’s Modified Beech Forest, which consists in opening up a beech stand so as to secure regeneration, merely to form a soil cover, leaving enough of the old stand on the ground to close up in thirty or forty years. By this treatment the large increment due to open position is secured without endangering the soil. Similarly the Storied or Two-aged High forest, was applied to the management of oak forest in mixture with beech. In a few localities also, on limited areas, a combination of forest and farming (Waldfeldbau) has been continued and elaborated, besides the more general use of coppice and coppice with standards.
According to the statistics for 1900 the following distribution of the acreage under different silvicultural methods prevailed throughout the empire:
Coniferous forest, of which 68 % is pine and 30 % spruce, prevails in Eastern and Middle Germany, deciduous forest, of which 20 % is oak, the balance principally beech, in the West and South.
Coppice and coppice with standards are mostly in private hands as well as the coniferous selection forest, the State forests being almost entirely high forest, i.e., seed forest, other than under selection method.
Methods of Improving the Crop. The credit of having first systematically formulated the practice of thinnings under the name of Durchforstung (for the first thinning), Durchplenterung (for the later thinnings), belongs to Hartig, although the practice of such thinnings had been known and applied here and there before his time. He confined himself mainly to the removal of the undesirable species, dead and dying, suppressed and damaged trees, being especially emphatic in his advice not to interrupt the crown cover. Excepting the early weeding or improvement cuttings, these thinnings were not to begin until the fiftieth to seventieth year in the broadleaved forest, but in conifers in the twentieth to thirtieth year.
The first attempt to explain on a biological basis the process and effect of thinning was made by Späth in a special contribution (1802). Cotta, in his Silviculture, although at first agreeing with Hartig, later in his third edition (1821) changes his mind, and improves both upon the biological explanation of Späth and the practice of Hartig, pointing out that the latter came too late with his assistance, that the struggle between the individuals should be anticipated, and the thinning repeated as soon as the branches begin to die; but he also recognizes the practical difficulty of the application of this cultural measure on account of the expense. Curiously enough, he recommends severer thinnings for fuel-wood production than for timber forests.
Pfeil accentuates the necessity of treating different sites and species differently in the practice of thinnings. Hundeshagen accentuates the financial result and the fact that the culmination of the average yield is secured earlier by frequent thinnings. Heyer formulates the “golden rule:” “Early, often, moderate,” but insists that first thinning should not be made until the cost of the operation can be covered by the sale of the material. Propositions to base the philosophy and the results of thinning on experimental grounds rather than on mere opinion were made as early as 1825 to 1828, and again from 1839 to 1846, at various meetings of forestry associations, until, in 1860, Brunswick and Saxony inaugurated the first more extensive experiments in thinnings. The two representatives of forest finance, Koenig and Pressler, pointed out, in 1842 to 1859, the great significance of thinnings in a finance management as one of the most important silvicultural operations for securing the highest yield.
In spite of the advanced development of the theory of thinning, the practice has largely lagged behind, because of the impracticability of introducing intensive management. Only lately, owing to improvement in prices and the possibility of marketing the inferior material profitably enough to justify the expenditure, has it become possible to secure more generally the advantages of the cultural effect. Within the last thirty or forty years, great activity has been developed among the experiment stations in securing a true basis for the practice of thinning.
New ideas were introduced through French influence and by others independently in the latter part of the eighties, when the distinction between the final harvest crop (Fr. élite, le haut) and the nurse crop (le bas) was introduced.4
The physiological reasons for the practice of thinning upon experimental basis, were advanced by the botanists Goeppert and R. Hartig, and among foresters, the names of Kraft, Lorey, Haug, Borggreve, Wagener, and others are intimately connected with the very active discussion of the subject lately going on in the magazines. Thinnings have become such an important part of the income of forest administrations (25 to 40 % of the total yield) that the prominence given to the subject is well justified, and a more modern conception of the advantages of thinnings and especially of severer thinnings is gaining ground.
The proposition, now much ventilated, of severe opening up near the end of the rotation, in order to secure an accelerated increment (Lichtungshiebe) is, however, much older; Hossfeld, in 1824, and Jäger in 1850, advocated this measure for financial reasons, while Koenig and Pressler anticipated the development of an individual tree management by pruning, and differentiation of final harvest and nurse crop, a method which is working itself out at the present time.
5. Methods of Forest Organization
As stated before, to Hartig and Cotta belongs the credit of having applied systematically on a large scale methods of forest organization for sustained yield; Hartig having been active in Prussia since 1811, and Cotta beginning to organize the Saxon forests in the same year. The method employed by Hartig, the so-called volume allotment, had been already formulated and its foundation laid by Kregting and others (although Hartig seems to have claimed the invention). But it was reserved to Hartig to build up this method in its detail, and to formulate clearly and precisely its application, as well as to improve the practice of forest survey, calculation of increment, and the making of yield tables. His method involved a survey, a subdivision, a construction of yield tables and the formulation of working plans, in which the principle according to which the forest was to be managed during the whole rotation was laid down for each district. The rotation was determined, divided into periods, finally of twenty years, and the periodic volume yield represented
The conception of such subdivision and the English nomenclature was independently first employed by the writer in his Report for 1887, as Chief of Forestry Division, when discussing planting plans for the prairies.