Silviculture Operations

Tending can be an important treatment to allow management objectives to be met at both the stand and forest level. The objective of tending is to ensure that desired individual trees are provided space, light, water and nutrients necessary for survival and growth. Tending can take a number of forms and occurs in all silvicultural systems.

The most common tending that occurs in the French-Severn Forest is stand improvement wherein residual trees are spaced and smaller desirable trees are released from overhead competition. Stand improvement is normally carried out in conjunction with a harvest with the stand improvement trees being diseased, of poor health and quality or simply too closely spaced to other trees. Stand improvement removes trees that are larger than saplings in any size class and occurs in both selection and shelterwood stands.

Both precommercial and commercial thinnings are forms of tending and may occur in young pine and tolerant hardwood stands but is most commonly carried out in red pine plantations with the objective of allowing trees to grow more vigorously and to a larger size.

Tending is also commonly done to remove small trees and sapling sized competition as well as herbaceous (non-woody plants) competition.  Most commonly this is to release desired conifers (white pine) from hardwood competition (red maple, aspen). Without this treatment on many sites, conifer renewal efforts are significantly put at risk. Dense competition essentially chokes out the young conifer trees.  This tending normally involves the use of federally registered and provincially approved herbicides that are applied by licensed operators at safe rates and under strict conditions with required buffers on aquatic features.  Although it is acknowledged that herbicide use is a controversial subject, an overwhelming scientific body of evidence supports this most efficient silvicultural tool as being safe in the environment, for wildlife, water, insects, soils and for human health.

Some manual methods such as brush saws can be used in some situations but these methods can be ineffective and inefficient. For example, cutting a soft maple sapling may result in vigorous resprouting of multiple stems from the single cut stump.

Lastly, Westwind has begun tending understory tolerant hardwood stands to greatly reduce the amount of beech regeneration. This is in response to Beech Bark Disease which is resulting in beech regeneration dominating understories and possibly future midstory canopies but with no future as they are expected to die before becoming mature trees. Different tending methods are being explored but broadcast methods will rarely if ever used.