International Paper Woods Tours
On Friday we started the day in the woods of the International Paper company for presentations on; Silviculture, the Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI), Special Places, and Harvesting. A picnic lunch, hosted by International Paper, followed at Bewabic State Park.
On the bus ride out to Iron Mountain, Gary Donovan gave teachers an overview on hardwood management and showed the video, "Trees Are the Answer" by Patrick Moore.
International Paper owns and manages 570,000 acres of forest in the Quinnesec
region. From their forestlands they provide the Quinnesec Paper mill with
1.5 million tons of wood annually.
Our hosts for this portion of the tour, Lee Crawford and Nick Monkevich, SE Unit Team Leader arranged a "walk through the woods" consisting of four stations for teachers to learn about different management issues.
One station, featuring Karen Gardner discussed the different phases of hardwood timber harvesting. She explained how trees were felled and then carefully cut to lengths that maximized the value of the fiber from the resulting logs. One tree with clear straight lengths might be cut into high-value sawlogs while another with many knots and/or crooks would go to be made into paper pulp. Or one tree might produce a combination of log values.
Another station featuring Jill Vandermeer, GIS Specialist and Todd Bishop, Supervisor of Technical Services discussed how GIS was being used by IP and how GPS is utilized as a data collection tool by foresters.
At the third station, Gary Donovan talked about forest patterns, a means of stand classification that helps foresters identify special areas and better carry out management activities.
At the last station, forester Bill Hasse demonstrated several data collection tools used by foresters such as the Biltmore stick, diameter tape, and Relaskop. Teachers also had a chance to try out these tools themselves and learn about the mathematic principles behind them.
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Bewabic State Park
More info about Bewabic State Park
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