Woodland News

rices for several species of hardwood lumber from North America have fallen rapidly since last summer, coinciding with the implementation of tariffs on hardwood lumber exports to China. 

The saga continues – we are still “waiting and seeing” how trade talks and tariffs may end up.

Worry is spreading among scientists throughout the Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York region.

The FORECON office in Titusville, PA has been BUSY. While the office has been growing and taking on new work over the past year and a half, this fall brought an especially busy set of days.

After a short hiatus we are happy to get back to reporting on hardwood lumber trends within our operating regions of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

On Wednesday, August 14th, several FORECON employees hosted a field tour for the Society of American Foresters (SAF) Plateau Chapter in northeastern Pennsylvania. 

There’s been a lot of talk about China these days and understandably so. 

It is not news that Northeastern forests are experiencing threats from a range of invasive insect and plant species.

For decades, baseball bats had been made almost exclusively of ash. But in the mid-1990s, Sam Holman, a sort of Johnny Mapleseed of baseball bats, started experimenting with maple, giving samples to several players for the nearby Toronto Blue Jays.

Summer in our region typically sees a mixed bag of market fluctuations; certain species (the maples in particular, but also some oaks and beech) are more readily affected by heat and direct sunlight than others after harvesting, and the demand for these species tends to decline a bit in the hotter months.