Plate 2-A. The natural forest area is 93 percent hardwoods. The underbrush is also often dense, the Chilean cane or Quila (Chusque a quila) growing profusely throughout almost all of the true forest area. Throughout its length, the forest is usually a combination of several species with a few, rarely more than two to five, making up the bulk of the merchantable volume. Two species alone, Coigue and Tepa, make up 58 percent and four species, Coigue, Tepa, Ulmo, and Tineo, 73 percent of the sawtimber volume. There are extensive areas, however, of pure forests with largely or entirely one species, Araucaria and Alerce occurring in this form. All of the principal species of timber size have Plate 2-B. Alerce, one of the few conifers in Chile; grows to immense size. some commercial value and a number have unusually fine timber properties. Defect is normally not excessive in consideration of the over-mature stands commonly encountered. As far as Puerto Montt, at the southern end of the great central valley, land clearing for agriculture has pushed the forest boundary back into the lake region on the east and into the rough coastal range to the west, though both of these sections, as shown in Figure 1, still contain extensive, unbroken bodies of timber. In these mountainous regions between Temuco and Puerto Montt, with annual rainfall often in excess of 200 centimeters, lie the best of the commercial timber stands of Chile. At Puerto Montt, the end of railhead, the central valley disappears beneath the sea, the Cordillera comes down to tidewater in rugged ranges, indented with many esteros or fjords, while the rugged coastal range now appears, first in the large island of Chiloe and then in a rugged archipelago stretching along the coast to the tip of Cape Horn (Plate 3). Except for large areas north of Castro and a relatively narrow strip of cleared land along the east coast, the entire area of Chiloe is still heavily forested, as is the neighboring mainland. the mainland, however, the forest is confined by the rugged character and high elevations of the country to a broad coastal strip and extensive areas along the main river valleys. Gradually, toward the south, the character of the forest changes, lighter and more scattered stands verging gradually into scrubby woodland and broad areas of grazing land and unfertile, rocky, or snow-clad ridges (Plate 4) until at about the Rio Baker sawtimber stands disappear, to be seen again in forests of commercial importance only in sheltered, favorable sections near the Straits of Magallanes. Here occur a few new but related species such as Roble de Magallanes (Nothofagus betuloides) and Nirre (Nothofagus antarctica). |