A report on a 1978 survey of private forest-land owners, based on 11,076 questionnaires. About 7.8 million ownership units hold 333 million acres of privately owned forest land in the United States. Regional and subregional breakdowns are included for such important variables as form of ownership; owner's occupation, age, sex, race, residence, and education; size class of ownership, etc. An important finding at the national level was that nearly half of the private forest land is in ownerships of greater than 500 acres; it is owned by less than 1 percent of the ownership units. These data are needed for policymakers to evaluate programs and forest industry will use them to forecast timber availability.
An estimated 3.9 million private forest-land ownership units hold 130 million acres of forest land in the Northern United States. These owners are diverse in legal organization, economic circumstances, personal characteristics, ownership objectives, and management experience.About 94 percent of the private ownerships are individuals, collectively holding 71 percent of the privately owned forest land (Fig. 1). Corporations hold 20 percent, and the remaining 9 percent is held by partnerships, undivided estates, clubs, associations, and Indian Tribes. Since 1978, individual ownerships, including joint husband and wife and family ownerships other than family corporations, increased in number and in the proportion of Literature Cited Barnard, J. E. 1978. FINSYS-tool for processing of integrated resource inventory data. In: Integrated inventories of renewable natural resources: proceedings of the workshop. Gen. Tech.
Information from a new study of forest-land owners has given us a new estimate of the number of ownerships and insight into the attitudes and actions of this important group of decisionmakers. Nearly half the private forest land is in ownerships with greater than 500 acres of forest. Nearly half of the owners have harvested timber from their holdings at some time in the past. Owners have a positive attitude toward timber cutting at a time when there is greater demand for products from the forest.Interest in harvesting the timber resource has created a situation in which watchful monitoring and good stewardship will be needed to maintain the productivity of ecosystems for future generations.
AcknowledgmentsThe development of this report has been a team effort, involving the work and contributions of many people. Foremost among these were the efforts of the private forest-land owners who completed and returned the questionnaire.
Log-grade classification 7A Commercial tree species of Ohio 78 Metric equivalents of units used in this report 79-Foreword The third inventory of Ohio was directed by Carl E. Mayer, Resources Evaluation unit leader. Joseph E. Barnard was responsible for inventory design and sample selection. John R. Peters supervised the aerial-photo interpretation and data collection by field crews.
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