Innovative Tree Designation Methods for a Complex Silvicultural Treatment: Costs, Efficiency and Outcomes

The pace and scale of ecological restoration in the US Southwest needs to increase dramatically, but conventional, paint-based tree marking has proven to be a significant bottleneck in the treatment pipeline. Alternative, paint-free tree designation strategies have been developed and introduced in the region, ranging from fully digital desktop marking to Designation by Prescription (DxP), in which harvesting operators make tree cutting decisions during implementation based on written silvicultural prescriptions. The Walker Hill Demonstration Project used five tree designation methods to implement a silvicultural prescription focused on ecological restoration. It was conducted at an operational-scale study site in northern Arizona, and the cost and effectiveness of each method was evaluated. Unsurprisingly, conventional leave-tree marking was significantly more expensive and time consuming than digital marking or unmarked DxP approaches. More notably, no statistically significant differences were observed in harvest productivity between designation methods, and most measures of silvicultural outcomes were consistent (or consistently variable) across methods.