Excerpt from Productivity of Forests of the United States and Its Relation to Soil and Site Factors and Management Practices: A Review A primary responsibility of managers of forestland is to maintain its productive capacity. To do this, managers of specific forest areas need access to information to (1) determine the productivity of the land and (2) relate the effects of land management practices to forest productivity. Various State, private, and Federal forestry research programs provide this background information. Given the large forested areas of the United States and the limited forestry research budgets, research results generally lag behind the needs of managers. Coupled with this lag is a certain inertia in adopting research-based technology. One way to minimize this technological lag is for researchers to periodically review and synthesize research progress, and this paper is such an effort. The objective of the work reported here was to evaluate and synthesize published data on productivity of major forest regions of the United States and assess what is known about management impacts on the productivity. Forest productivity has always been a major concern of land managers, and much research has been directed toward assessment of forest productivity. The wide variety of yield tables and yield simulator models available to the forester is evidence of this. Considerable research has also been done on the impacts of management activities on forest growth and development. Several problems arise, however, when the available literature is synthesized. The main difficulty is the lack of a consistent definition of forest productivity, which is a result of the natural bias of foresters toward wood production. Unfortunately, wood production is fairly low on a tree's list of production priorities; growth of roots, foliage, and reproductive structures all are higher. Wood production is probably not the best indicator of site production poten tial, and the problem in assessing productivity is further compounded by using volume as a measure of productivity. Comparisons of productivity based on volume suffer from regional differences in measuring volume, a range of merchantability limits, and even site-to-site differences in the specific gravity of wood. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.