• Shepard, Robert K.
  Associate Professor School of Forest Resources
  

Fertilization of forest stands to increase growth offers most promise where competition among individual trees for light and water is not so intense that the trees are not able to respond to the improved nutrient conditions brought about by fertilization. This suggests that stands in which density control has been practiced, either by thinning, by a sufficiently wide initial spacing in the case of plantations, or both, should be favored for fertilization. Natural stands of red spruce (picea rubens Sarg.) in Maine have been shown to respond to fertilization with nitrogen (Shepard,1979), but litt1e information is available on response of plantations to fertilization with nitrogen. This report describes the growth of row-thinned white spruce (p. glauea (Moench) Voss) plantations near Bingham, Maine for the three years after fertilization with different rates of nitrogen