By: Mark Ashton
Matthew J. Kelty—Thank you for your work in forestry. It was a privilege to work with you as a friend and colleague.
Matt Kelty—Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst—died on December 30, 2023. He was a dear friend and colleague. I got to know him when I was a master’s student at Yale. I went to his doctoral defense in 1984. He was my teaching fellow in silviculture at that time. He came on our first Yale forestry field trip together to the British Isles when he was a professor at Rutgers in 1985, but for almost all his career, he was at the University of Massachusetts. When I was appointed as a lecturer of silviculture at Yale in 1991, we started working together on the regeneration of mixed hardwood forests with David Kittredge MF’80 PhD 86, and I worked with him ever since that time, both on various field research projects and in writing books. Matt’s work and interests were on understanding the nature of how mixtures of tree species grow in native forests and then translating this to application in plantations. His original thesis work on the dynamics of mixtures was on the New England hemlock-oak-cherry/birch forests at the Great Mountain Forest, CT in the Berkshires (Kelty, 1989). But his interests grew to understanding the interactions of other conifers in hardwood forests, such as white pine (Kelty, 1992). He then used this understanding to apply to mixed species dynamics in tropical realms (Menalled et al., 1998). His seminal work on mixtures was published on applications to plantations in Forest Ecology and Management (Kelty, 2006).
In addition to his research, he worked on several books. The original was a festschrift to our major professor, David M. Smith (Kelty et al., 1992). But he became a coauthor in Smith’s last edition of the internationally recognized silviculture textbook “The Practice of Silviculture: Applied Forest Ecology” (Smith et al, 1997) and then worked with me on the most recent edition (Ashton and Kelty 2018).
We went on numerous field trips together to Europe and throughout the U.S. I shall always remember him as a giving and humble colleague. Thank you for the memories and thank you for being such a great friend.
– Mark S. Ashton, Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, Yale University
Seminal Papers
Kelty, M.J., 1989. Productivity of New England hemlock/hardwood stands as affected by species composition and canopy structure. Forest Ecology and Management, 28(3-4), pp.237-257.
Kelty, M.J., 1992. Comparative productivity of monocultures and mixed-species stands. In The Ecology and silviculture of mixed-species forests: a Festschrift for David M. Smith (pp. 125-141). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
Kelty, M.J., 2006. The role of species mixtures in plantation forestry. Forest Ecology and Management, 233(2-3), pp.195-204.
Menalled, F.D., Kelty, M.J. and Ewel, J.J., 1998. Canopy development in tropical tree plantations: a comparison of species mixtures and monocultures. Forest ecology and management, 104(1-3), pp.249-263.
Books
Kelty, M.J., Larson, B.C. and Oliver, C.D. eds., 1992. The ecology and silviculture of mixed-species forests: a festschrift for David M. Smith (Vol. 40). Springer Science & Business Media.
Smith, D.M., Larson, B.C., Kelty, M.J. and Ashton, M.S., 1997. The practice of silviculture: applied forest ecology (No. Ed. 9). John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Ashton, M.S. and Kelty, M.J., 2018. The practice of silviculture: applied forest ecology. John Wiley & Sons.
