A Comparative Analysis of Timber Harvesting, Timber Supply, and Tree Planting Across Ownerships and Regions of the United States

Forests in the United States support the world’s largest wood products sector while providing several other ecosystem services. Forest management in the form of timber harvesting and reforestation determines the overall sustainability of all service values. We use remeasured forest inventory plots to define harvest rates and intensities and estimate economic harvest choice and tree-planting models for subregions and ownership groups. Annual harvest rates range from near zero in the southern Rockies to 3.8% of forest plots in the South-Central region. We find that harvest choices for all regions and ownerships except public ownerships in the Pacific Coast region are responsive to changes in timber prices. We estimate regional timber supply equations using Monte Carlo simulations of harvest choices applied to current inventory plots. This defines supply as a function of both quantity of standing biomass and the detailed composition of inventory. Timber supply is shown to be more responsive to sawtimber prices than pulpwood prices and is mostly inelastic; the exception is the Pacific Northwest, where supply is price elastic (∼1.5). Estimated tree-planting models indicate that tree planting on private land is also responsive to timber prices in the South, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and Northern Rocky Mountains. Combining estimated harvest and tree-planting choice models with long-run inventory plot projections, we find no indications of unsustainable harvesting or increasing timber scarcity. Projected shifts in long-run timber supply indicate that nearly all potential for supply growth is in the eastern United States, especially in the South-Central region.