What is silviculture?
Silviculture is the science and art of establishing and tending forests to get the best timber products. It is analogous to the planting, weeding, and other culture necessary to grow food crops.
Forestry is a science. One of the most important of the many disciplines in forestry is silviculture. Silviculture is the agriculture of trees--how to grow them, how to maximize growth and return, and how to manipulate tree species compositions to meet landowner objectives.
To understand silviculture, one must first understand silvics. Silvics involves understanding how trees grow, reproduce, and respond to environmental changes.
Silviculture involves managing and handling the forest in view of its silvics. Silviculture imitates a natural change--such as a windthrow, beetle infestation, or fire. However, silvicultural methods harvest forest products for human use rather than wait on nature to burn them, eat them, or blow them down. Silviculture can be practiced at any time in the life of a timber stand.
Silviculture looks not only at the timber crop currently available, but also at the effects of present day harvesting on the next timber crop. We foresters are in a unique business in that we commonly make management decisions that will affect crop quality and growth 40 to 80 years into the future.
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