Fernow Experimental Forest overstory tree and regeneration data from the "Management Intensity Demonstration" study

This data publication contains overstory and sapling tree tallies, woody stem regeneration tallies, and butt-log tree quality data collected from 1949 to 2008 on the Fernow Experimental Forest in West Virginia. These data were collected for the Management Intensity Demonstration (MID) study also known as the Cutting Practice Level (CPL) plots. Four adjacent 5-acre study areas were assigned different management regimes considered 'high-order', 'good', 'fair', or 'poor' in 1949. An additional 5-acre area was established as an untreated reference in 1956.
Management Intensity Demonstration (MID) or Cutting Practice Level (CPL) studies were established on several forest types in the eastern United States to determine the long-term effects of different forest management regimes in use in the 1940s. The more than 60-year-old MID study on the Fernow Experimental Forest (FEF) is in the Allegheny Mountains of the Central Appalachian Broadleaf Forest. Other MID studies were established at experimental forests in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, and New Hampshire. These datasets are used by USDA Forest Service scientists, staff, and cooperators in support of research in silviculture, forest management, forest economics, and forest ecology in the central Appalachian region and inter-regional comparisons.
The FEF MID study has been documented in numerous unpublished Forest Service working plans and amendments, progress reports, file memos, and descriptions of treatments. Important information from those documents are provided below, while scanned versions of the original documents are included as supplemental information with the full data publication download. Original metadata date was 09/29/2017. Minor metadata updates made on 06/13/2019.