Management of native forests in the Central North Island,1919–1977

Abstract

This chapter summarises the earliest official (European) attitudes to exploitation of native forests, and the foundation of the New Zealand Forest Service (NZFS) in 1919. The short-term and uncertain nature of early timber mills greatly influenced the development of native forest policy. Further changes in official attitudes to logging of native forest began after the implications of the National Forest Survey of 1946–55 became clear. Analysis of this huge database reinforced earlier predictions that the native timber resource would be exhausted sooner than anyone had expected, and led to a series of changes in management strategy, new methods of inventory and assessment, studies of regeneration rates, trials in selective logging from 1959 onwards, and eventually to new management proposals for native forest including the cessation of clearfelling from 1977. We also describe the planned transition to fast-growing exotic forests, the only kind that would be able to meet future demand. The early development of this forest conversion policy aiming to supply the sawmills with exotic logs in the foreseeable future required a lot of experimental study by scientists of NZFS on replanting clearfelled areas in exotics, and some of this was done at Pureora.