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Forestry 101

To help make things a little easier on everyone, our discussions about forestry, management, and the forest products industry will be generally confined to the context of the Black Hills National Forest.  As you may already know, the issues that frame national forest management - especially here in the Black Hills - are complex enough on their own!  There are, however, many resources on the Web that can provide you with information about all of forestry's myriad forms.  If you still have burning, unanswered questions after you’ve read through the information on this page, please feel free to visit our directory of forestry links, or just send us an email

So, what is forestry?  In a few words, forestry is the science, art, business, and practice of conserving and managing forests and forest lands to provide a sustained supply of forest products, forest conditions, or other forest values desired by the forest owner (cf. Ford-Robertson, 1971).  More specifically, forestry combines a functioning scientific knowledge of soils, hydrology, wildlife and habitat, plant physiology and natural history, biometrics, and ecosystem processes, with the application of land surveying, timber harvest systems and operations, information technologies, and business.  In this sense, forestry is where the rubber of scientific knowledge meets the road of achieving ecological, social, and economic land management objectives.

As you might imagine from its extremely broad definition, forestry is a tremendously diverse and internally specialized profession.  Each and every forest of the world is biologically unique; accordingly, so is the practice of forestry therein.  In the western US alone, for example, one might find every forest type from bottomland hardwoods and ponderosa pine in low elevations, to lodgepole pine, aspen, and Douglas fir in middle elevations, to spruce-fir and hemlock-fir in the upper-most elevations.  Each of these very distinct forests is managed in a different fashion, which is tailored to fit the natural processes that shaped them and the physiological traits of the tree species themselves.  Adding another layer of complexity, each forest landowner - be they private citizens, state or federal government agencies, forest products companies, etc. - has a unique set of objectives for managing their forestlands.  Forestry is the vehicle that carries forest land from its present-day condition toward tomorrow's objectives, as defined by the landowner. 

So, you may be asking yourself, "How exactly do foresters go about practicing their 'art and science?'"  Well, once the stages of scientific forest assessment and management planning are completed, foresters turn to any number of things in their toolbox that can be used to reach a landowner’s desired objective.  These include many forms of logging, thinning, and tree harvesting, tree planting, and controlled or 'prescribed' burning, to name a few.  In the Black Hills, the most common tool of the trade uses ground-based logging and thinning systems to apply a scheme of harvests called a "shelterwood/seed tree".  As you can see, this system involves several intermediate thinning treatments that open up the forest and allow trees to grow vigorously.  These thinnings also make way for the next generation of trees, which grow up underneath the shelter of their elders (hence the name, shelterwood).  Often, each shelterwood or seed tree harvest is followed by some form of prescribed fire; either 'jackpot' burning of piled logging debris or 'broadcast' burning of dispersed limbs and twigs across a larger area.  When the trees have reached maturity, and the small regenerating trees beneath them have taken a firm hold, the mature trees are removed to allow their progeny to take over.  The shelterwood/seed tree system is like many others in forestry -- it's a cycle, from beginning to end, of a tree's life.  This ensures that we'll never run out of trees, that people will never run out of wood, and that the forest is maintained in a healthy and vigorous condition.  For more information on how the system of forestry used in the Black Hills works, please see our brief primer on the Black Hills Ecosystem.