The United States must rely on vast private and public forests in the country’s Deep South—and not the well establised Pacific Coast—to supply the world’s largest producer of raw materials for wood and paper. That is according to a new study, which, for the first time, combined estimated harvest and tree-planting models with long-run inventory plot projections to find “no indications of unsustainable harvesting or increasing timber scarcity in (United States) forests.”
Led by David Wear, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future Institute, and John W. Coulston, a scientist at the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station, researchers modelled harvest rates from 115,000 or more forest plots – a process that allowed them to characterise forest management profiles for all areas of the United States (taking in more than 245 million acres of nonreserved (private and public) forestlands.
“To define the linkage between timber market conditions and forest management choices, we (also) modelled the propensity of forest owners to harvest timber in response to prevailing timber prices and their forests’ conditions,” Wear and Coulston said. “Timber supply is shown to be more responsive to saw timber prices than pulpwood prices and is mostly inelastic; the exception is the Pacific Northwest, where supply is price elastic (∼1.5). (Whilst) estimated tree-planting models indicate that tree planting on private land also responds to timber prices in the South, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and Northern Rocky Mountains.”
As it stands, nearly all the long-run growth potential for timber supply resides in the East, predominantly in the Deep South: “The South, divided into the Southeast (SE) and South Central (SC), had 61% of tree removals; the Pacific region, comprising the Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Pacific Coast (PC), had 17% (the PNW alone had 12%); and the North, consisting of the Northeast (NE) and North-Central (NC), had 19%. The Plains (PL) and Rocky Mountains North (RMN) and South (RMS) together represent about 3% of removals,” they said. In terms of ownership, commercial owners make up 21% of the nonreserved forest area and contribute 48% to timber harvests. “Family owners hold 48% of the forests and produce 41% of harvests, whilst public forests (31% of the area) contributed 11%.”
About 10% of the forest area – 25 million hectares – was recorded as planted at the beginning of the measurement period, with the South home to 17.9 million hectares of planted forests (72%), followed by PNW 3.2 million hectares (12%), and the North 2.3 million hectares (9%). “Planted forests provided 32% of harvests in the United States, varying across regions. Planted forests provided 52% and 46% of harvests in the SE and SC, respectively, and 39% in the PNW. Among the remaining regions, only the NC has more than 5% harvest area from planted forests (8.4%),” they said. “Harvest shares for planted forests are highest for commercial forests in the SE (69%) and SC (61%) and for all private owners in the PNW (40%).”
Trump must ramp up logging by 450% to meet the order on lumber
The new research comes after Wood Central last month reported that Donald Trump would find it “incredibly challenging for the US federal timber harvest to offset Canadian wood products in the coming years” without significant capacity, workforce and CapEx expansion.
That is according to Austin Lamica from Fastmarkets, who said the United States would need to increase federal timber harvests by 450% to meet the shortfall in Canadian plywood, OSB, and softwood lumber, which make up vast volumes of timber used in single—and multi-family housing. “Theoretically, the US federal lands have ample timber supplies to offset the volume of softwood lumber imported from Canada,” he said. But, “increasing federal timber harvests by (at least) 450% may be a challenge as many headwinds, aside from those related to lumber production capacity, may limit the government’s ability to ramp up timber production.”
- To read more about the impact of building materials on the cost of a new home, click here for Wood Central’s special feature from April.
