If a landowner‘s main objective is to maximize his/her profits from planted forest investments, questions such as when and where exactly they should fertilize, thin and clearcut must be answered. We take advantage of an experiment established in 5 different states in the US South. Forest inventory data was collected for different combinations of thinning densities where some of them received fertilization. We use the Land Expectation Value methodology where our assumptions are the infinite amount of Pine rotations while costs and stumpage prices are known and constant, and markets are perfect. One of the main results we found is that fertilization has a decreasing marginal benefit on site index quality. / M.S. / If the landowner‘s main objective is to maximize profit from forest investments, questions such as when and where they should fertilize, thin and clearcut must be answered. Fertilization‘s main objective is to provide essential nutrients for tree growth. Thinnings have two main objectives: a source of revenue in the middle of the forest rotation by selling the thinned trees and secondly to open space to the residual trees so they grown in diameter and gain value. We analyze how thinning and fertilization impact forest management from an economic perspective by checking their benefits and costs to landowners. We found that for low site index, fertilization has a positive impact in the sense its benefit is greater than the fertilization application cost. For better site indices, the opposite is true. For those who want to maximize economic benefits from planted forests. we end up with recommendations of which type of thinning and fertilization should be done according to the landowner site quality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/102348 |
| Date | 06 January 2021 |
| Creators | Sartori, Pedro J. |
| Contributors | Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Schons Do Valle, Stella Zucchetti, Barrett, Scott, Sullivan, Jay |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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