Wednesday, 7 January 2015

Information About Foresters

By Carey Bourdier


If you have a love of nature and its preservation, one job that you might consider is that of a forester. This is a field of highly trained and educated individuals who love to work outdoors and ensure the proper management of our forests and the logging industry. This is also an ancient profession that dates back to medieval times.

In ancient times, the forester was a type of law enforcement agent. This person monitored the forest lands of kings and lords, ensuring that poachers were not illegally killing the forest animals, managing game and also sometimes hunting down criminals that might be hiding in the woods. In addition, the forester also dealt with the sale and usage of timber grown on the property. Before he gained famed as the author of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer worked as a forester in Somerset, England.

Currently, foresters usually aren't setting traps for poachers or hunting down bandits. They are far more concerned with making sure that forests are well managed and sustainable. To learn how to accomplish this as well as other forestry-related tasks, many colleges or universities offer degree programs for budding foresters. In addition to undergraduate and master's degree programs, you can also earn a doctorate in forestry from some colleges.

For timber foresters, their job typically lies within the guise of logging and timber operations. They help with everything from planting to knowing which trees to cut and when. The ultimate goal of this type of forestry management is to make the logging operation as sustainable as possible, while still keeping the business profitable. In addition, sometimes foresters deal with the buying or selling of timber.

A conservation forester is another type of forester that deals primarily with the management of public forests and forests not used for logging purposes, although they do consult for logging operations. They provide information about forest inventory, age and health as well as often making recommendations about proper management. To do this, they use a variety of tools, including an inclinometer, which is sometimes called a clinometer and helps determine tree height by measuring the angles of tilt or slop. A device called a hypsometer is used to determine the diameter of a tree, and an increment borer will be used to take samples so the forester can determine tree age and study tree rings.

Foresters are concerned with more than just trees, and they also focus on land management, watershed preservation and trying to keep an overall ecological balance in the area in which they are working or consulting. They survey trees but also collect data about other types of plants, data about animals and also data about various water sources within an area.




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