of the Journal of Forestry — Proceedings of the 2015 National Silviculture Workshop

T his Special Issue of the Journal of Forestry presents the Proceedings of the 2015 National Silviculture Workshop (NSW), which was held as one of the concurrent sessions of the 2015 National Society of American Foresters (SAF) Convention in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sponsors for the session included the D-2 Silviculture Working Group and two US Department of Agriculture Forest Service Washington Office deputy areas—Research and Development, and the National Forest System. This marks the second time the NSW has been held in conjunction with the National Convention of the Society; the first time was at the 2013 National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. The proceedings of that Workshop were also highlighted in a Special Issue of the Journal of Forestry, which included a short introduction by Guldin and Buford (2014), who described in detail the history and significance of the NSW. In 2015, the Workshop was built on the theme, “Silviculture and Changing Climate: Strategies, Tactics, and Practical Prescriptions.” Climate change is a hot issue, so to speak, not only in the current political discourse of the Nation and among nations but also within the scientific community generally and the forestry research community as well (Vose et al. 2012). The practical implications for the Nation’s forests are that climatic conditions 100 years from now will be different from what they are today, and the effects most likely to be observed in forested systems in the short term are altered disturbance regimes involving wildfire, damage from intense wind events, insect outbreaks, ice storms, and changing patterns of precipitation leading to drought-related tree mortality. Anticipating, responding to, and capitalizing on disturbance events in managed and unmanaged stands have been in the wheelhouse of the silviculturist for decades. Silvicultural prescriptions are pathways that carry a stand from an existing condition to a desired future condition, ideally supported by timber sales from trees that are superfluous to that future condition. Disturbance events can alter the existing stand condition either in part or in total. In anticipation of or in response to that, the silviculturist intervenes to establish a silvicultural prescription that will respond to the new stand condition or effectively anticipate and reduce the risk of loss. Actions are hopefully accomplished through a commercial sale of trees that have been damaged or proactively removed and carry the stand toward the original or a revision of the desired future condition. This is technical work with which silviculturists are clearly familiar and experienced. The short-term implications of changing climatic conditions for the practice of silviculture are numerous. First, interventions after disturbance might become more common, or the magnitude of disturbance might be at such a scale that markets for salvaged timber are overwhelmed. These challenges will redirect the ongoing work of the silviculturist. Again, this is nothing new in the forester’s job description, but the frequency or scale might be different as the effects of climate change occur locally. Another implication is tied to the fact that the desired future condition on public or private lands might change as a result of changing climatic conditions. The goal in that event is to figure out what that future climate might be and how forest stands might respond, and then to revise the ongoing silvicultural prescription in the stand as needed to achieve the newly defined conditions. Finally, the effects of changing climatic conditions might replace the existing forest types with new or novel forested ecosystems. In that event, the existing silvicultural prescriptions or even the underlying ownership objectives and management plans might need to be redrawn completely. But again, this is work with which silviculturists are familiar—a major timberland acquisition in the private sector often requires a similar approach. So the challenge for the practicing silviculturist or research forester remains as fun as it always has been. In one sense, our silvicultural tools aren’t changing all that much—we’ll continue to plant trees, use natural regeneration, invest in site preparation and release treatments as necessary, use thinning and controlled burning, harvest stands with clearcutting, seed-tree, and shelterwood methods, or manage complex structures using uneven-aged and multiaged methods. In another sense, silvicultural research will continue to push the envelope in terms of understanding and anticipating the impacts of climate change. New research will be needed to develop new and novel forest