Natural regeneration under Continuous cover forestry
The schedule of the course will be send to registered PhD students in July. Officially, the course will start on the 1th of Sept. Volontary meetings will be organized in Alnarp, Uppsala and Umeå, but also online. The most important dates are September 22-24 when you have to come to Umeå to master this course. The deadline to submit your individually written Essay on natural regeneration processes in managed forests under various shelter condidtions will be September 30.
Introduction
Read the introductory course literature! The first week of September, you will be asked to read two scientific articles to become familiar with the terminology. Then, the teachers from Norway, Sweden and Finland will describe how CCF is generally understood in the country. One introductory paper is the review written by Pommerening and Murphy (2004) on the history, definitions and methods of continuous coverforestry with special attention to afforestation and restocking (Forestry 77: 27-44)
At the end of the first week, you should submit one page where you describe your own understanding of CCF by using different definitions.
Group work
At the end of the second week of September, you should decide about the student group which will study aarticular type of harvest method in more detail during the meeting in Umeå. You can select 1) Single-tree selection cutting, 2) Patch cutting, 3) Target diameter cutting and 4) Shelterwood cutting.
Depending on your choice, we will provide you with 2-4 studies of such methods applied in existing experiments and will explore together certain characteristics of the natural regeneration under various shelter conditions. This will be the main task in Umeå. In addition, we will teach you method to survey regeneration in the field, not only for scientific purposes but also how to get a rough estimate for management purposes.
Essay writing
The final task after our meeting in Umeå will be to write an essay of 5-10 pages where you describe regeneration processes after different harvest methods applied on the experimental sites. Then, you should be well aware about the silvicultural terminology and also differences between the different countries.
In addition, we want you to prepare for discussions with forest managers in particular stands. The goal is that you can give advices based on the observations from different experiments on various sites, and provide interested managers with a framework to estimate reasonable future possibilities of the stand development.