Jon asked some questions about nurseries, and so I went looking to answer the question “what kind of nurseries are there that produce forest tree seedlings?” It turns out that the Forest Service has partnered with Southern Regional Extension Forestry to put up a website that shows nurseries in the US and Canada, . So I’m posting in the interests of public service.
Jon asked about the terms reforestation and restoration. The Helms (1998) Dictionary of Forestry definition for reforestation is: “the reeestablishment of forest cover either naturally or artificially.” Anyone have the newer edition and can check if there’s a new definition? But I think when these people use the term, they probably mean “planting plants that aren’t trees” because reforestation has traditionally dealt with trees (“forest cover” doesn’t usually mean bear clover or manzanita. It’s confusing for sure, as people have always “reforested” burned areas whether they had timber production goals or simply shade goals. And if you’re talking outside what we might call the refo/resto community, restoration may mean prescribed fire, thinning, removing invasives or a variety of things not related to planting plants at all.
Ah, but people will say “trees are not forests, forests are a complex interrelationship…”. While is absolutely true, of course. So perhaps trees are necessary, but not sufficient to be part of a forest. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine “restoring a forest ecosystem” without trees.
Afforestation is defined as “establishment of a forest or stand in an area where the preceding vegetation or land use was not forest.”
Trivia Question
Name the largest human-made forest in the United States (at least according to its website)
The Nebraska National Forest has the largest human-made forest in the US
Yay! Here’s what the website says..https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/nebraska/about-forest/?cid=STELPRDB5340714
Oh and on this history..
“1922 – Grazing of plantations with horses started for the purpose of reducing the fire hazard. Cattle grazing found injurious to the young trees.”
An interesting article on the history here.. https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2016/a-forest-built-by-hand/
The only reason I knew which forest it was was because we visited/drove through it on a family trip one summer and that stuck with me! We were amused by the fact that there was a Nebraska National Forest.
As is typical, the nursery directory is woefully out of date and incomplete.
Should we try to locate who does the updating?
I am surprised because usually the RNGR Team keeps a lot of things on that site fairly up-to-date. I don’t use that directory, but I do use the site search function a lot to see what they have on different topics and I am always pleasantly surprised at how current it is.
Thanks! (And there is also stream restoration – often dealing with physical damage from roads or grazing.)
No one is suggesting that a “forest” has no trees. But forests come with great diversity: young, old or ancient; patchy or uniform; with a diversity of possible age-combinations, successional stages; sparse or densely “treed”. Diversity support a diversity of wildlife, as part of the forest ecosystem. The knotty issue is the assumption that forest “health” can only be measured by the condition of the trees, a minority of “forest” species. JAB