ICF Announces Silvicultural Prize Winners
ICF is delighted to announce that Barry Gardiner, Jean-Michel Leban, David Auty and Helen Simpson are joint winners of the 2011 Percy Stubbs, John Bolton King and Edward Garfitt Prize for Silviculture for their co-authored paper “‘Models for predicting wood density of British-grown Sitka spruce”.
Their winning paper was published in ICF’s journal of international research Forestry in Volume 84(2), pp. 119 – 132. Forestry, which is available on subscription, is published on behalf of the ICF by Oxford University Press.
This paper describes the development of models to predict wood density in Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis (Bong.) Carr.) growing in Britain. The models were designed to be practical and widely applicable and useful for large-scale resource mapping and investigating the impact of silvicultural treatments.
Two models (and a variant of the second) were developed using data obtained from a 52-year-old spacing trial in Clocaenog Forest, North Wales, and a 32-year-old re-spacing experiment in Kershope Forest, Northern England. The model equations were based on models used to describe the within-tree variation in the wood density of Norway spruce (Picea abies L. Karst.) in France and functions of ring width and ring number from the pith.
The models were able to explain up to 48 per cent of the variability in density from Clocaenog but only 27 per cent of the variability in the density from Kershope, although they were able to accurately represent the radial trends in wood density. Some of the difficulties in explaining the variation in density may be due to the differences in the site conditions, silviculture and age of the trees at the two sites, but it is clear there is significant inter-tree variation in the data.
Lead author Barry Gardiner , Emeritus Silviculturist at the Centre for Forest Resources and Management, Forest Research, has been invited to accept the award at the ICF’s National Conference Dinner at the Royal Over Seas League on 16 May.
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