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A Comparative Analysis of Forest Harvesting, Timber Supply, and Tree Planting across Regions of the United States

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  • Wear, David N.

    (Resources for the Future)

  • Coulston, John W.

Abstract

Much of the United States is heavily forested, and these forests support the world’s largest and most diverse wood products sector while providing several other ecosystem services. Forest management in the form of timber harvesting and reforestation determines the overall sustainability of all service values. We use remeasured forest inventory plots to define harvest rates and intensities and estimate comparable economic harvest choice and tree-planting models for all subregions and ownership groups of the United States. Annual harvest rates range from near zero in the southern Rockies to 3.8 percent of forest plots in the South-Central region. We test hypotheses regarding the economic rationale of harvest choice and find that all regions and ownerships except public ownerships in the Pacific Coast region are responsive to changes in timber prices. We estimate regional timber supply equations using Monte Carlo simulations of harvest choices applied to the plots constituting the current inventory. This approach to supply uniquely accounts for not only the quantity of standing biomass but also the detailed composition of inventory. Timber supply is shown to be more responsive to sawtimber prices than pulpwood prices and is mostly inelastic (one-period price elasticities

Suggested Citation

  • Wear, David N. & Coulston, John W., 2024. "A Comparative Analysis of Forest Harvesting, Timber Supply, and Tree Planting across Regions of the United States," RFF Working Paper Series 24-09, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-24-09
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    File URL: https://www.rff.org/documents/4520/WP_24-09.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Bill Provencher, 1997. "Structural Versus Reduced-Form Estimation of Optimal Stopping Problems," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 79(2), pages 357-368.
    2. Darius M. Adams & Clark S. Binkley & Peter A. Cardellichio, 1991. "Is the Level of National Forest Timber Harvest Sensitive to Price?," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 67(1), pages 74-84.
    3. Dennis, Donald F., 1990. "A probit analysis of the harvest decision using pooled time-series and cross-sectional data," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 176-187, March.
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