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Inventory & Cruising Newsletter

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[What's New]

Timber Tips

We found a PDF of the old "Timber Tips" publication from the USDA Timber Management office (July 1986). Here is a link to the PDF. Timber Tips were sent out regularly by the USFS over a number of years.  This is a compilation of about 200 out of 1,200 of them, and is hard to find on the Internet in pdf format. 

The program still exists, and can be reached at : Timber Tips (usda.gov) or  https://www.fs.usda.gov/forestmanagement/products/measurement/timbertips.shtml. They invite topics of this sort from field people. 

A more recent discussion forum is at :
Planting trees, milling logs, and everything in between. (reddit.com)  or https://www.reddit.com/r/forestry/. This covers a number of field topics and institutional issues in forestry and similar field work.



Jim Lowell

Jason Teroka informed us that Jim Lowell, an influential mensurationist in the redwood region, passed away on July 17, 2024.

Jim entered the masters program of forestry at the University of Minnesota in 1956. In 1958, shortly after the birth of their fourth child, his family of six moved to California after he accepted a job with the California Department of Forestry at Berkeley, as a research scientist specializing in silviculture. The family settled in the Bay Area, living in Walnut Creek and later Concord, where their fifth and final child was born in 1963. In 1968 he accepted a job with the U.S. Department of Forestry and the family moved to Riverside. In 1970 he was able to transfer to Humboldt County and the Redwood Science Lab on campus at HSU.

Jim’s career in forestry spanned 40+ years both as an employee of the CDF and USFS and later as an independent contractor working and conducting studies on his research plots in the Jackson State Demonstration Forest in Mendocino. He was proud of his career and research accomplishments and never lost that drive to learn: always reading, studying and willing to share that knowledge with others through lectures and scientific publications.

You can read the full obituary at James Lowell Obituary. 



Norm Marsh
Norm Marsh

Norman Marsh age 93, who worked with the OSU Variable Probability Short Course for 55 years passed away July 15, 2023 - with his wife Donna by his side, after nearly 75 years of marriage.

Norm was a fixture at the course. Well into his 80’s, he was putting in 60 plots a day as a timber cruiser, and doing serious cruising and appraisal work for a great number of clients. He was a working advertisement for the methods OSU taught at the course, and an endless source of practical advice. He also did several expert witness jobs with some of us, and he was just awesome on the witness stand.

Norm was born Aug. 20, 1929 in Noti, Oregon and married Donna in 1948. His lifelong passion of forestry led him to a long and successful career that included working for The State of Oregon, Willamette Industries and ultimately his own consulting firm.

We will miss him greatly.

Star_Bar Spreadsheet Update

Kim Iles has provided us with an updated copy of his EXCEL Variable Plot spreadsheet Star_Bar.  This computes a great many useful things about Variable Plot Sampling, and in particular the count/measure ratios.  This revision just cleaned up a few typos and minor layout changes to the spreadsheet.  No computational errors from the older copy are known.  This is referenced in the short article “Rounding your plot radius factor” in the newsletter.
 
Microsoft 365 gets paranoid about downloading EXCEL files sometimes  (and sometimes objected to using the old version), so let us know if you have any trouble downloading or running this spreadsheet.

The Man Who Knew Trees

Jim Girard was known as “the check cruiser of the universe”, and probably the most famous of all timber cruisers in the 20th century.  His biography was dictated by him during a bout of pneumonia, and eventually edited and published as a short pamphlet by the Forest History Society (as they are now known).  It is a great read.  The Society website has a great many other readable articles on forest history, many having to do with Forest Inventory at: 

     https://foresthistory.org/

We would like to thank Eben Lehman (of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC), who kindly made an effort to dig this out of their files for us when it could not be found on the Internet – and agreed to make it available to our readers. 

We thought you might be interested.  It is only 35 pages long, (7,300KB in size as a pdf, if you want to download it).  You will recognize many of the same types of people that you meet today.  His final personal comments in the last paragraph are particularly lovely.

Forestry Field Reference Book

Jim Kiser (Instructor of Forest Engineering, Resources, and Management at Oregon State University) has just published a handy forestry reference book. The book is distributed by John Bell and Associates. From the preface:

"the text is meant to serve as a reference for practicing foresters and other natural resource professionals who work with field measurements as a part of their job requirements. Although primarily focused on timber and timber stand, the book also serves for typical engineering of forest forad layout with an added section on curve layout formulas and tables. The intent of this book was not to provide an inclusive set of forester's tables, but to pull together the more common tables necessary to the day to day activities..."

Contact Jessica at: forestrybooks@gmail.com to acquire a copy of your own.


Items of Interest:


 Past Features & Information

 What's New (08/16/2023)

Browse Our Newsletter Index Rounding your Plot Radius Factor (PRF) (08/16/2023)
The Statistics for Practical People Series
(Published April 1988 - October 1989)
Sampling Piles and Distributed Waste (03/09/2023)
 Our 3P Sampling Collection Some Publications of Interest (03/09/2023)
Is It True That... Our series addressing myths and other folklore about forest sampling. Weighted Averages (03/09/2023)
It's the People... Series An Experimental Design Issue (03/09/2023)
The Compassman, The Nun, and the Steakhouse Statistician Minimizing Missing Plot Problems (03/09/2023)
Western Mensurationists Distribution Calculations  (01/19/2023)

Renewed Access to Jerry Leech's "Lessons not learnt at university"  (01/17/2023)
  Growth Model Users Group Archive Back Online  (01/17/2023)
Downloads:

Some Important People in Our Profession


John Bell
Jim King
Jim King
Harold Burkhart
Harold Burkhart

Walter Bitterlich
Walter Bitterlich
David Bruce
David Bruce
Frank Freese
Frank Freese
George Furnival
George Furnival
Lou Grosenbaugh
Lou Grosenbaugh
Ingvar Haglof
Ingvar Haglof
Benno Hesske
Benno Hesske
Bert Husch
Bert Husch

Updated 05/19/19