Impacts on South Carolina timber production over the last five decades.

Timberland ownership patterns and national forest timber harvesting policy have undergone significant changes in South Carolina over the past five decades. Timber output studies for the state commonly focused on short time frames and seldom addressed timberland ownership patterns in detail. We describe fifty-year timber output for South Carolina, allowing us to address economic cycles, industrial expansions and contractions, hurricanes, shifting ownership patterns, and national forest timber harvesting policies. We also addressed the relationship between mill capacity and industrial timber output. We utilized published timber trend, industrial roundwood output data, mill data from the USDA Forest Service and additional data from their Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) unit in order to extend prior studies in terms of time frame and ownership focus. We broke public ownership into national forest system, other federal land, and state-owned land classes and private timberland into industrial, other corporate, and family forest land classes. Other corporate timberland owners included institutional investors like timber investment management organizations (TIMOs) and real estate investment trusts (RElTs). By establishing these timber production trends by ownership beyond the simple private and public ownership classes, additional insights were gained on which sectors contributed to timber output.