Forestry Mini Courses
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Mini-courses in Forestry and Natural Resources
For students with a limited forestry/natural resources background, a series of one credit graduate level mini-courses has been devised to offer overviews of several relevant subject areas. These mini-courses are:
- FOR501 - Dendrology (when taken the first five weeks of the semester): Identification and natural history of eastern woody species with studies of their taxonomic classification, physical characteristics, and typical habits. Laboratories stress sight recognition and use of identification keys and trips to natural forest communities
- FOR502 - Forest Measurements: One-third semester mini-course. Forest measurements covering principles, terminology, and practical field applications. Land area measurement, units of timber measure (cubic feet, cords, weight, board feet), estimating volume of standing trees, sampling techniques for forest inventory (strips, plots, points), measures of site quality and stand density, methods for projecting future timber volumes.
- FOR503 - Tree Physiology: One-third semester mini-course. Fundamental principles of physiological processes in forest trees affecting tree and stand growth and development in natural forests and managed plantations. Concepts of whole plant physiological processes including photosynthesis, respiration, water relations, nutrition, periodic growth, sexual and vegetative reproduction, and seedling quality with forestry examples of each process.
- FOR507 - Silviculture: A condensed version of silviculture. Ecological processed affecting establishment and growth of forest stands with particular emphasis on forest types of southeastern United States. Forest stand productivity, how productivity influenced by site, stand, climatic factors, and application of site specific prescriptions to establish and manipulate composition, growth, and health of forest stands.
- FOR509 - Forest Resource Policy: Principles of forest policies and processes. Political processes, institutional and interest group participation, forestry laws and programs, current issues, and policy analyses.
- FOR510 - Introduction to GPS: One-third semester mini-course. Introduction to collection and use of mapping grade global positioning satellite systems data. Includes review of cartographic properties, mission planning, hands-on collection of GPS points, lines, and areas, differential correction, editing, and exporting GPS files to a GIS.
- FOR608 - Forest Management Planning: Forest management involves acquisition of land or forest management rights, long-term management of land and associated resources, and production and delivery of commodities and services produced on the land and the dynamics of these processes.
