Integrated Forest Products Research (Comment on FR Doc # 2013-08781)

One of the greatest challenges the wood industry in the Appalachian region faces today is the high volume of low value hardwoods in the forests associated with poor markets. It is estimated that about 40 to 50% of the timber volume is of low value (Luppold and Bumgardner 2003, Forest Prod. J. 53(3):54-59). This may be especially true of small and limited-resource landowners. The presence of low-value species and individual trees with poor markets provides economic incentive to “high-grade”, or harvest only high-value timber trees leaving the trees with low-value to reproduce. Suggested uses include a new method for dividing these logs into usable parts. Very little investigative effort has been made to develop uses for grades 3, 4 and 5. For instance, there may be potential to use low quality hardwoods as a substrate for exotic mushrooms and bio-products, including organic composts, useful for forest soil improvement. By making use of these lower grades to generate financial returns in the short term, it is believed that landowners will have greater economic incentive to undertake Timber Stand Improvement (TSI), which will benefit themselves and the forest products economy in the longer term. We believe that the RFA for the Integrated Forest Products Research should allow for approaches that target: i) TSI techniques for forest management, ii) conversion of biomass by-products from TSI practices to value-added products and, iii) the utilization of materials from TSI to improve soil quality and enhance carbon sequestration in forests.