Joe McNeel, director of the Division of Forestry in West Virginia University’s Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences, has been appointed to serve a three-year term on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forestry Research Advisory Council.

The council reports to the secretary of agriculture on regional and national planning and coordination of forestry research within the federal and state agencies concerned with developing and utilizing the nation’s forest resources, forestry schools and the forest industries.

The council also advises the secretary of agriculture on the apportionment of funds for the McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research Program.

Nominations to the Council were reviewed by the USDA ’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service and Forest Service.

A WVU alum (B.S.F.’79), McNeel returned to his alma mater in 1997 to lead the Division of Forestry.

The division offers undergraduate and graduate programs and conducts research in four fields: forest resources management, recreation, parks, and tourism resources, wildlife and fisheries resources, and wood science and technology.

Under his leadership, WVU joined an elite group of land-grant institutions that are home to Centers for Wood Utilization Research.

The centers were established to generate the new knowledge and technologies needed to maintain a vigorous and competitive domestic forest products industry based on sustainable use of the nation’s forest resources.

The centers address the major problems confronting the domestic forest products industry and have the breadth to span the sustainable utilization and harvesting of eastern hardwoods, southern pine, western softwood and northeastern species, with additional focus on the development of associated manufacturing and machining technologies.