Uneven-Aged Silviculture of Longleaf Pine

The use of uneven-aged silviculture has increased markedly in the past 20 years. This is especially true in the southern United States, where the use of clearcutting and planting is often viewed as a practice whose emphasis on fiber production results in unacceptable consequences for other values, such as those that benefit from maintenance of continuous forest cover over time. Public lands in general, and national forest lands in particular, have become the focal point for the replacement of clearcutting and planting with even-aged and uneven-aged reproduction cutting methods that rely on natural regeneration, and that can better achieve management goals that are defined by residual stand structure and condition rather than by harvested volume. Land managers in the southern United States are keenly interested in a renaissance for longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) (Landers et al. 1995; Barnett 1999). Of the four southern pines, longleaf pine has experienced the greatest percentage loss in forest area, from 37 million hectares prior to European colonization to approximately 2.2% of that currently (Frost this volume). That scarcity has in-