Harvest Impacts of Soil Nutrition: Implications for Federal Forestland Regulatory Directives

Under federal forestland management policy, silviculture activities must not degrade timber site quality. Threshold exceedance would be deemed detrimental to stand and site quality, triggering post-harvest mitigation activities. This research project focuses on the measurement of forest harvest impacts and post-harvest nutrient replacement strategies. The nutrient mitigations would be focused on site nutrient pools in temporally separated but spatially adjacent clear-cut forest stands located on nutrient deficient soils. Proposed research questions are as follows: 1) Does clear-cutting forest stands impact soil and tree foliar nutrition in the beginning and mid-term stages following harvest and 2) Are post-harvest nutrient amendments necessary to alleviate any observed nutrient reductions. Project outcomes will: 1) Provide growth and nutrition data to inform United States Forest Service (USFS) Region 1 forestland management strategies and 2) Recommend site-based adaptations to current USFS regional harvest disturbance thresholds. This project presentation is a preliminary poster presenting on my proposed work outline and what data has been collected thus far including a hypothesized result