Liberation cutting has similar goals to

cleaning Cleaning is the process of removing unwanted substances, such as dirt, infectious agents, and other impurities, from an object or environment. Cleaning is often performed for aesthetic, hygienic, functional, environmental, or safety purposes. Cl ...

, namely the allocation of resources to the most promising trees available on a site. What separates liberation cutting from cleaning is that the overtopping competitors are of a distinctly older age class.Smith, D.M., B.C. Larson, M.J. Kelty, P.M.S. Ashton (1997). ''The Practice of Silviculture: Applied Forest Ecology''. John Wiley & Sons, p. 151. Need for liberation cutting often occurs when seedlings of a desired species have been regenerated by a logging operation, but that operation has left older, poor quality or undesired trees that are shading the regeneration and limiting its growth. Liberation cutting may be superficially similar to an overstory removal cutting. The major difference between these is that in the overstory removal, regeneration was deliberate and the best trees were saved for the final harvest. In the liberation cutting, the worst trees remain and regeneration was likely an afterthought to a logging operation. Harvesting the undesired trees is not a requirement in liberation operations; the poor quality trees may be killed in place and left as

snags In forest ecology, a snag refers to a standing, dead or dying tree, often missing a top or most of the smaller branches. In freshwater ecology it refers to trees, branches, and other pieces of naturally occurring wood found sunken in rivers and ...

, or felled and left to contribute

coarse woody debris Coarse woody debris (CWD) or coarse woody habitat (CWH) refers to fallen dead trees and the remains of large branches on the ground in forests and in rivers or wetlands.Keddy, P.A. 2010. Wetland Ecology: Principles and Conservation (2nd edition). C ...

References

Forest management {{forestry-stub

See also

References