Terms

Replacement Cost: Current cost of replacing an existing stand or property, without taking depreciation into account.

Rotation: the planned number of years between stand formation and cutting. 

Roundwood: a segment of a felled tree of no particular length that has a round cross- section. The term usually refers to raw material cut logs or tree-length logs being delivered to a forest products mill. 

Rural: area containing fewer than 150 persons per square mile. 

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Salvage cut or thin: Harvesting dead trees or those in danger of being killed (by insects, disease, flooding, etc.) to save their economic value.

Sanitation cut or thin: Harvesting or killing trees infected or highly susceptible to insects or diseases to protect the rest of the forest stand. 

Sawnwood: sawn products produced from logs, also called lumber. 

Sawtimber: timber product from large diameter trees (12 in. & up) of good quality used to make lumber. 

Silviculture: the practice of controlling the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests to meet diverse needs and values of landowners, societies and cultures. 

Single-aged Stand: see even-aged stand. 

Site index:  a measure of the productive capacity of a particular site.  For natural stands, site index is the total height of the dominant tree at 50 years of age.  For planted stands, site index is the total height of the dominant trees at 25 years of age.

Softwood: wood from gymnosperms, trees with needle-like leaves that are typically evergreen conifers. Pine (Pinus), spruce (Picea), and hemlock (Tsuga) are softwoods. 

Stagnation:  when too many trees are competing for resources in the same area.  Stagnant stands of timber have high mortality, grow slowly and provide little or no income for the landowner.  Stagnation can be avoided in planted stands through proper spacing, timely thinning and the use of quality seedlings.

Stand density:  a measure of the amount of timber growing on a site, expressed on a per acre basis in number of trees, basal area or volume.

Stand Table: total number of stems per acre (or tract total) in a stand by DBH class and species. 

Stock Table: total volume of stems per acre (or tract total) in a stand by DBH class. 

Stocking:  the number of trees in a forest stand.  The stocking level is open compared to the desired number of trees for best growth and management and is referred to as under stocked, fully stocked, or over stocked. 

Structural Panel: a building material made from layers of veneer (plywood) or layers of glued wood strips (OSB). 

Stumpage: value of standing trees “on the stump”; price of the trees that a landowner receives from a timber sale. 

Succession:  the replacement of one plant community by another until ecological stability (climax forest) is achieved.  An abandoned farm left to maturity would go through different states of vegetative cover and finally reach the climax forest stage after many many years. 

Superpulp: unofficial designation used to describe pulpwood-sized pine trees from which one 2 x 4 board could be cut. 

Suppressed trees:  overtopped trees with crowns entirely below the general canopy level, receiving no direct light from above or from the sides, and which have lost the ability to resume normal growth if released.

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TIMO, Timberland Investment Management Organization: a group that manages timberland investments for institutional investors by locating, evaluating, and acquiring timberland for their clients. TIMOs also manage properties for their clients to get a targeted return on investment.