Abstract Results of a thinning experiment which compared four European thinning methods and unthinned control, initiated in a 13-year-old slash pine plantation in Louisiana, were studied over a 27-year period. The greatest net growth was made by the lightly thinned plots. Average stand diameter was increased by thinning, but thinning had no appreciable effect on the height of the dominant stand. Thinning resulted in trees with slightly less taper and fewer knots on the butt log but did not affect the specific gravity of the outermost ten growth rings or the proportion of pole-and-piling trees. Thinning was financially advantageous.
Keister et al. (Wed,) studied this question.