Coming up on Sunday, September 15, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., the public is invited to attend the official dedication of the New Zealand Forest, the most significant addition to the Washington Park Arboretum in decades!
First conceived nearly 10 years ago, the 2-acre New Zealand collection will feature more than 10,000 plants, shrubs and grasses that are found on New Zealand’s South Island. The exhibit—located on a boulder-strewn hillside crisscrossed with rock swales—is the second of five eco-geographic forests to be completed in the Arboretum’s Pacific Connections Garden, which will eventually cover 14 acres and be the largest exhibit of its kind in North America.
The New Zealand Forest under construction this past May.
Construction of the New Zealand Forest cost roughly $2 million, with funding from the Arboretum Foundation and the 2008 Parks and Green Space Levy, and planners are extremely excited to see the garden opened to the public.
“This is our legacy to leave behind for future generations to enjoy, like Azalea Way or the Winter Garden,” says Fred Hoyt, associate director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens (UWBG), which owns and manages the collections at the Arboretum.
The opening celebration—organized in partnership with the Seattle-Christchurch Sister City Association and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture—will pay homage to New Zealand’s culture and ethnobotanical history. The dedication will include a Māori dance troupe from Vancouver, British Columbia, to perform a traditional “haka,” or war dance. Caine Tauwhare, a Māori wood carver who carved the slats for a park bench in the new forest, is also traveling from Christchurch (Seattle’s sister city in New Zealand) for a demonstration. Members of the local Muckleshoot Tribe will be there to greet the Māori, who by custom won’t enter a new land until the native people have welcomed them. (In the lead-up to the formal dedication, the Burke Museum will be highlighting its New Zealand collection, and the Māori dance group and carver will be there on Saturday, September 14, for a separate performance and demo.)
Sunday’s festivities will also include a host of speakers, including speeches from Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, UW Vice Provost for Global Affairs Jeffrey Riedinger, New Zealand Honorary Consul Rachel Jacobson, and senior officials from the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, Seattle Parks and Recreation, and the Arboretum Foundation.
The New Zealand Forest last week, coming together beautifully in time for the public dedication.
Building the New Zealand Forest has been an enormous collaborative effort that has involved the support of many partners, including Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Arboretum Foundation and The Berger Partnership, the design firm hired for the project. UWBG Director Sarah Reichard and Hoyt have been closely involved in the planning and creation of this new exhibit since its inception, and they’re grateful for all of the community volunteers and energy, as well as the citizens of Seattle for supporting the levy that funded the garden’s infrastructure.
As the New Zealand Forest matures, it will be a spectacular new garden to enjoy at the Arboretum. Visitors will be able to immerse themselves in unfamiliar landscapes—modeled on actual plant communities from the South Island of New Zealand—and discover beautiful plants they’ve never seen before. When you do visit, though, be mindful that many of the plants will be small for a while yet. Of course, that’s part of the joy of a collection like this: It will continue growing and changing for as long as it’s here. “No garden is ever done,” says Reichard, and they will keep adding new plants for years to come.
Check back with UWBG closer to the date for the most updated schedule of activities. The dedication is free and open to the public—no ticket or RSVP required—and will take place at the Pacific Connections meadow at the south end of the Arboretum. There will be live music, a ribbon cutting, cake and lemonade, and tours of the new garden. So come out and explore the New Zealand Forest!
Parking and Transportation
Arboretum Drive will be open to one-way traffic, going south, for the duration of the event. Parking will be permitted along the right-hand side of the drive, as well as in designated Arboretum parking lots. To help reduce traffic, please consider using public transportation, or coming by bike or on foot.
The Rosmond sisters–Julie (left), Marti and Polly–and cousin Tom Rosmond, who lives in Forks.
In 2007, the three daughters of Fred Rosmond—a local forester and longtime mill owner/operator in Forks, Wash.—provided the initial funding for an endowment, the Rosmond Forestry Education Fund, to honor their late father. Distributions from the endowment provide the Olympic Natural Resources Center (ONRC) a steady stream of funds to bring speakers and programs to Forks that are of interest to the community, including the extremely popular astronomy program ONRC hosted in May with UW doctoral students (more than 175 people attended!).
This past week, the Rosmond family agreed to expand the endowment’s original focus on forestry and forest management to include a wider spectrum of topics in science, natural resources, technology, medicine and mathematics.
That’s wonderful news for ONRC, because this endowment makes a big impact on funding outreach activities for local residents and UW students!
We recently received an inquiry requesting help identifying a particular tree in Seattle’s Colman Park. Martha Edmond, the inquirer, wrote:
One of the photos Martha Edmond sent to help identify the tree, which turned out to be a Lombardy poplar.
“I wonder if you are able to help me. I am researching an artist who painted along the west shore of Lake Washington (circa 1905) near Colman Park. The artist included a row of trees in his work. I was told years ago by a dendrologist that they were native to the West Coast, and that they were willows—but they are certainly not “weeping” willows.
An article is being published on this artist, and it would be nice to identify the type of tree. I am attaching some views of the trees that I took on a trip to Colman Park. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!”
We forwarded the photos to a few folks here at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and Professor Sarah Reichard immediately guessed that it was likely some sort of poplar—possibly a Lombardy poplar—but said she would need more than a slightly unfocused image to be certain.
So, taking advantage of lovely weather this week, Professor Emeritus Bob Edmonds and his wife decided to head over to Colman Park to have a look in person. They found two poplars in the area and confirmed that one does, in fact, have the small leaves and crown shape of a Lombardy poplar, which has European roots and is not native to the Pacific Northwest. Edmonds says the other, which has larger leaves and a different crown shape, is likely a black cottonwood, which is native to North America, including Washington and Oregon. Who knew such a seemingly simple inquiry could yield such a complicated explanation?
Thanks to everyone for helping solve this mystery, and we hope we were able to help Martha Edmond and Ottawa Magazine with their story!
It’s not easy to get a close-up of Haley Lane. Between her sailing and surfing and skiing, you’d wear out a good GPS unit just trying to keep up with her. True, some of her passions are more earthbound—gardening, for instance—and Lane doesn’t consider herself a thrill seeker (you won’t find skydiving on her to-do list). But whether she’s taking a year off school to live in Maui and sell shave ice and surf every day, or bobbing in the waves off Westport or Port Angeles, or knifing through the Columbia River in her sailboat, one thing is abundantly clear: Lane is rarely at rest.
Lane rips along in her Tasar sailboat.
So as she approaches her final quarter at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), we thought we’d share what she’s up to before she slips away to the next adventure!
When School is In
Lane is majoring in Environmental Science and Resource Management at SEFS, and her favorite courses have involved field trips, including tree identification with Professor Emeritus Tom Hinckley. Four or five days a week this summer, as well, Lane has been squeezing in a few hours working for Professor Stanley Asah in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management Lab. She’s helped with a few projects, and at the moment she’s involved in assessing and social acceptability of wood-based biofuels.
She started out transcribing conversations from focus groups and working on surveys to find out what community members and family forest owners think about biofuels. Having grown up around Seattle, Lane says you can feel somewhat insulated from strongly divergent perspectives, particularly when it comes to political and social issues. The biofuels project, though, has provided an unvarnished education in the state’s regional and ideological variances. “It’s been really interesting to hear different sides to the story and really see where people are coming from,” says Lane.
Unless she’s in class or in the lab, you will almost certainly find Lane, left, somewhere outdoors.
The survey work has also inspired her senior capstone project. Lane hasn’t finalized the scope of her research yet, but she definitely wants to focus on responses to the first question community members answer with each survey: What do you think about biofuels made out of wood? It’s purposefully broad and open-ended, she says, to let participants share their unfiltered thoughts and interpretations. As a result, the responses capture a wealth of information about preconceptions, emotional and economic stake, and other reactions to biofuels.
When School is Out
“I first started sailing when I was little kid on my dad’s boat, and then on my own at 10,” says Lane, who grew up on Bainbridge Island. She loves the physical and mental challenge of sailing, especially in small boats, and pushing herself in friendly competition. “Plus, it makes the beer taste better at the end!”
These days, she races a 15-foot Tasar sailboat, and starting this weekend, in fact, she and her boyfriend, Anthony Boscolo, will be competing in the 2013 Tasar World Championship. Hosted by the Columbia Gorge Racing Association, the weeklong racing competition takes place August 10-17 in the Columbia River near Cascade Locks, Ore. It will be Lane’s first time racing in this regatta, and she’s expecting about 60 boats from around the world to be there. It’s a spectacular setting, if a bit windy, and they’ll be sailing three hour-long races a day.
Lane has been gardening for two years, and this year she hopes to expand into more flowers and ornamental plants.
As a final tune-up, Lane and Boscolo headed down to the Columbia Gorge this past weekend for their last regatta before the Worlds—and they won! Not all of the competitors had arrived yet, but quite a few international teams were already down and testing out the waters. “The out-of-towners will start to figure out the local conditions this week,” she says, “but it was a very satisfying win nonetheless, no matter how we place at the Worlds!”
Next Up
This fall, Lane plans to finish up her coursework and graduate. She’d like to find a job related to her major, but she admits her career future still looks pretty hazy—and isn’t likely to sharpen too much before she’s out of school. Far more tangible on her horizon, though, is a February trip to Mexico for a wedding. A friend down there has a few extra boards, she says, so she hopes to sneak in a little surfing!
In the world of forest management, the stakes are usually pretty high. Short-term decisions and long-term planning can have huge environmental and ecological impacts—on everything from wildfires and wildlife habitat to local jobs and sustainable construction materials. When Julie Baroody started her field research in Mexico, though, the situation was put more simply (and a bit more personally): Do a good job, or a local villager goes to jail.
“Oh man,” she remembers thinking, “that’s a big responsibility.”
Julie Baroody down at Pack Forest.
Baroody, a graduate student at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), had just arrived at a village in the highlands of Mexico’s Chiapas state. Lázaro Cárdenas is a self-governed indigenous community, or ejido, based on subsistence farming and the milpa system of crop rotation. As the population has grown in recent years, the demand for new households has put greater pressure on the available timber stock, and also led to more permanent agriculture.
Each year, villagers have had to travel farther and farther to find oak for firewood—their primary source of energy, including for cooking. Community leaders were concerned they would soon run out of firewood entirely, and that only pine would remain in their traditional pine-oak forest
“Pine takeover” of the pine-oak forest is common in the highlands of Chiapas, but Baroody wanted to know how much was due to firewood harvest and how much to villagers’ prioritization of pine, which can be used as timber. So began the field portion of her thesis project—with a little more than a degree on the line!
The Root of It All
Baroody moved to Seattle to start graduate school in the fall of 2011 after six years working with the Rainforest Alliance on sustainable land use. She had helped launch a program to enhance their work mitigating climate change, and part of her role involved traveling to different sites around the world.
During international trips, Baroody says she would walk through all sorts of forests and wonder about their dynamics and health—why one forest needed thinning, for instance, while another was not dense enough. Those questions eventually triggered a new plan: Find a graduate program where she could deepen her understanding of how forests work. She didn’t necessarily want to be a forester, she says, but Baroody wanted a practical background in forestry to inform her project management experience.
Baroody coring a tree in her study area in Chiapas, Mexico.
She was living in Portland, Maine, at the time, not far from where she grew up in Blue Hill along the state’s coast. Baroody then started reaching out to SEFS students and faculty who were doing work similar to what she had in mind. She ended up connecting with Jason Scullion, who was wrapping up his Master’s project in Mexico (and is now working on his Ph.D.), as well as Professor Kristiina Vogt. Those conversations eventually led her to Professor Greg Ettl. “I wanted to learn about sustainable forest management, and I thought Greg would be the best person to teach me that,” says Baroody. Just as important, he took her on with the understanding she would be looking for a research site abroad.
Working through her Rainforest Alliance contacts, Baroody explored a few potential options in Ghana and Peru but eventually decided on the firewood project in Mexico.
It seemed like the best opportunity for her research to have an impact on how forests are managed, but the program almost never got off the ground. Baroody often waited through long weeks of radio silence from her contacts and barely had any details finalized before flying down for several months of field work. Yet in the end the arrangement came together, and Baroody says Ettl was extremely patient and gave her the space—even when the plan seemed on the verge of collapse—to set up the project. “Greg has been really terrific,” she says. “He stood by me the whole way.”
Far Afield Independent by nature, Baroody says she has a knack for stranding herself in tricky situations with minimal support—and then making the best of it. First there was an iffy study abroad program she survived in Peru, but a stiffer test came after she graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont.
Several community members assisted Baroody with her field research, including helping with translation and interviews.
Following an internship in her hometown with the Marine Environmental Research Institute, she arranged to teach Spanish literacy to kids on a local coffee farm in the Dominican Republic. Julia Alvaraz, a Dominican author of magical realism, and her husband had purchased Café Alta Gracia to transform it into a sustainable coffee business and writing retreat. It certainly sounded like a romantic adventure.
The reality for Baroody, however, was that she found herself teaching out of a shack for several months, cut off from nearly all communication with home and the outside world. Back copies of The New Yorker were her only English-language reading, and she remembers riding a guagua (basically the back of a truck) down to town to find out the results of the 2002 elections back in the United States.
She discovered a few things about herself, including that teaching might not be her true calling. Yet Baroody says she also got to live in a beautiful place near the Haitian border and came away with a memorable experience. So in the end, definitely worth it.
For this next project in Mexico, Baroody was relieved to know she would have a more extensive support network. In addition to her contacts at ProNatura Sur, the NGO she originally worked with to set up the research, Baroody would be collaborating with a local university, ECOSUR, the Colegio de la Frontera Sur. One of their professors, Dr. Neptali Ramirez Marcial, was an expert on the region’s ecology and ecological transition, and he would sit on her graduate committee and assist her research.
So with her project mostly organized, Baroody arrived in Mexico in April 2012. Professor Greg Ettl flew down to Chiapas shortly after to spend a week with her and give her a crash course in field research and equipment training. Then she had her first meeting with the community leaders in Lázaro Cárdenas, the study village. “They were very concerned about their firewood use and wanted to know when it was going to run out,” she says, and they were looking to her for analysis and answers. ProNatura Sur had established the relationship with Lázaro Cárdenas through a staff member who was an ejido member, and it was his freedom on the line if she made any missteps. Though the community leaders approved of the project (and sealed the deal with a shot of local liquor), it was an intimidating experience.
For Baroody, field season meant long hours in the woods or interviewing locals, and then long evenings transcribing and entering data.
The Research Grind
Lazaro Cardenas is fairly isolated and self-managed, which Baroody says made the project a good laboratory experiment. Her research primarily took two forms: data collection in forest plots, and interviews with local residents to see how they use the firewood (how often they harvest, where they gather wood, how much they use, etc.).
For the latter task, she had four village elders assigned to be her research assistants and facilitate the interviews (in some cases, people they encountered only spoke the Maya language traditional to Lázaro Cárdenas, so they also served as translators from tzotzil to Spanish). Since Baroody wasn’t living in the village—she rented a room in the nearby city of San Cristobal and commuted up to Lázaro Cárdenas every day—she felt the elders were indispensable for earning trust and legitimizing her work. “I couldn’t have done it without them,” she says.
Each morning, she and her team would head out into the field from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Later that evening when back in her room, Baroody would then set to work transcribing the day’s interviews and entering data. It was an exhausting, around-the-clock schedule, and just about her only socializing came via Skype with her boyfriend back in Maine.
By June, Baroody had completed her field work and headed back to Seattle. In her final assessment, she wasn’t able to tell the village exactly how long their firewood supply will last, but she collected enough information to help them create a plan to start reforesting some of the oaks, and to do more selective harvesting. She believes that as the town becomes more accessible by road, as well, increased availability of propane—which has a comparable cost of firewood—will additionally reduce some of the ecological pressure on the forest.
“Beatrice is definitely a teenager, putting everything in her mouth and barking when you don’t pay attention to her,” says Baroody.
Jail time, in the end, was averted, and Baroody says she came away far more confident in her research and interviewing, and feeling capable of leading a team in her field. “It was trial by fire,” she says, and there were times she grew frustrated with hitches and challenges beyond her control. “But I learned to be more patient and go with the flow a little bit.”
This summer, Baroody is putting the final touches on her research and will be defending her thesis, “Firewood Extraction as a Catalyst of Pine-Oak Forest Degradation in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico,” on Monday, August 12 (the public portion of her defense begins at noon in Anderson 22). She’s also completing a final class before earning a nonprofit management certificate from the Evans School of Public Affairs.
After that, she plans to move back to Portland early this fall. She’ll be taking her new puppy—a 7-month-old hound mix named Beatrice—and rejoining her boyfriend on the East Coast. The only questions left by then will be, ‘Which organization will she be running, and when?’
Maureen Ryan holding a Cascades frog (photo by Ashley Ahearn)
Maureen Ryan, a post-doc in Professor Josh Lawler’s lab, recently took a journalist out backpacking in the Olympics to visit her field sites. Ashley Ahearn, who is based in Seattle with KUOW Public Radio, was working on a story for EarthFix about Ryan’s research into what will happen to wetland habitats in the Pacific Northwest as the climate changes.
The EarthFix “field notes” story, which ran on Friday, July 19, includes a bunch of cool photos and videos of mountain goats and Cascades frogs in the Seven Lakes Basin area (plus, Ahearn is producing a longer radio segment, set to air this coming Monday). Great stuff!
SEFS collaborators with Ryan in the Wetlands Adaptation Group include Se-Yeun Lee, another researcher in Lawler’s lab, and graduate student Meghan Halabisky. Ryan’s field crew also includes Noll Steinweg, Mara Healy, Rae Parks and Reed McIntyre, and the group’s research area covers three national Parks—Olympic, Mount Rainier and North Cascades.
While researching material for a book he’s writing about the history of CFR/SEFS, Professor Emeritus Bob Edmonds came across a book that one of our alumni, Bob Dick (’74), recently coauthored with his childhood and long-time friend Darrel White, a high school biology and science teacher. Edmonds just finished reading the book, Skunk Cabbage and Chittum Bark: Sons of the Wynooche, and he was kind enough to offer a brief review!
Here’s what he had to say:
“Skunk Cabbage and Chittum Bark is an interesting history on the background of many of our undergraduate students in the 1960s and early 1970s who came from rural backgrounds, and it illustrates how things have changed. The two authors grew up in Montesano and the Wynooche Valley (also spelled Wynoochee), which is between Olympia and Aberdeen/Hoquiam, and the book title refers to plant species the authors describe as “among the quintessential inhabitants of the Wynooche Valley.” Skunk cabbage is common in swampy areas, and chittum bark is Native American for cascara bark, which has medicinal properties. Peeling cascara bark was an income source for Bob and Darrell as young boys.
The book is divided into six parts: Wynooche Genesis, Kid Stuff, Family, Work, Reminiscence and The Valley, as well as an Epilogue. In each section Bob and Darrell document their separate and collective life stories, mostly from the 1950s to 1970s. In all there are nearly 60 short stories or vignettes, such as “Coming to the Valley,” “School Years,” “Fun with Amphibs,” “Timber!,” “Summer Camps,” “Mom and Dad,” “The Birth of a Career,” “The Logger,” “Hikes,” “The Lake,” “The Columbus Day Storm,” “Geology with Calvin and Hobbes,” “Eco-adolescents” and “The River.”
No doubt, Bob’s decision to enter a career in forestry was influenced by his father’s profession as a forester for Weyerhaeuser Company, and the hours he spent in the woods exploring, fishing and hunting. Bob served in the U.S. Coast Guard in Washington and Alaska, then graduated with a BS in Forest Management from CFR and became a professional forester, including stints as Alaska’s state forester and the Washington Forest Protection Association. He is a fellow of the Society of American Foresters, and he retired in 2010 after a 36-year career.”
If you’d like to read more about Bob Dick’s story, his book is available in paperback on Amazon for $18, and also in a Kindle Edition for $9.99 (Skunk Cabbage and Chittum Bark: Sons of the Wynooche, by Bob Dick and Darrel A. White, 2012. Bookstand Publishing, Morgan Hill, CA 95037. 248 pp.). You can also reach Dick via email at mrdickjr@gmail.com if you wish to request a copy.
One of the challenges of working at a large university, even if you’re part of a smaller school within it, is getting to meet all of your colleagues. Professors are often scattered to remote study areas or holed up in labs, and everybody seems to have a different research specialty. It’s hard enough learning who they are and what they do, let alone where they’re from, or what kinds of stories lurk behind their casual hellos and handshakes.
At the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), the challenge is doubly hard for those who work at field sites away from the main campus. They don’t get to bump into folks in the coffee room, have a beer after a seminar, or swap news and jokes before meetings. Most interactions occur over the phone or email, and you can go months—even years—knowing someone only by their name announcing itself in your inbox.
Pat Saunders having what she called a “Badlands Hair Day.” While camping in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, she says the wind was so bad your chair would get swept away as soon as you stood up.
Today it might be “Pat Saunders” who crops up in the corner of Outlook as you take your first sips of coffee. You’ve communicated with her before, no doubt, and familiar details break through your morning haze. You know she works down at Pack Forest and assists Professor Greg Ettl in his role as director of the Center for Sustainable Forestry. You might also know that she oversees staff who manage the daily operations of the conference center and 10,000 square feet of building space, and that at any given moment she could be budgeting, working with students on a class trip, organizing a research trip, giving forest tours or rescuing lost hikers.
But you’re only scratching the surface. You know there’s more to her story, and that if you pulled up a seat next to her and uncorked a bottle, you’d be in store for hours of entertainment and education, and likely a surprise or two—and you’d be right!
The Maine Concern
Pat Saunders grew up in the small coastal town of Surry, Maine, near Acadia National Park. The community of about 1,500 is located in a part of the state known as “Down East,” nautical slang from the days when ships from Boston would sail east to ports along the Maine coast (even though they’d be heading northeast, the wind would be at their backs so they’d technically be sailing downwind, hence the oddly contradictory “down east”). Timber and fishing were the primary industries, as well as tourism in nearby beach towns during the fleeting summertime.
Saunders (left) with her oldest sister Crickie and her son Bryan in Seattle.
Saunders lived in Maine for most of her life until her son Bryan, who had moved out to Seattle, suffered a serious motorcycle accident near the end of 2007. To help with his recovery, she flew out and lived with him for five months as he worked through physical therapy. It took nearly a year before he fully recovered from his injuries, but his mom was enormously thankful for the happy outcome. “The good news is he was fully geared up with helmet and gloves,” she says. “It could have been much worse.”
Not long after Saunders returned to Maine, though, she started thinking she might want to make a permanent move to Seattle. She knew that would mean leaving behind three sisters and a brother, loads of friends and a lifetime of memories. And there was one other potential holdup: Would her son consider it weird if she moved out to live near him?
She called Bryan to ask what he thought, and he gave her an enthusiastic endorsement. Then the wheels really starting turning, as Saunders packed up her things and invited Candy, her best friend of 25 years, to drive and camp their way across the country in the fall of 2008.
Their road trip started with a leg from Maine to Indianapolis to stay with a friend. Next they headed up to Gary, Ind., and skirted around Lake Michigan and Chicago. From there it was a straight shot on Interstate 90 to Seattle—a shade more than 2,000 miles—with plenty of new states to experience. “We had two rules,” says Saunders. “We couldn’t eat in any restaurant you could find somewhere else in the world, and we had to buy a six-pack of local beer in every state we visited.”
They had set out near the end of September, so as they crossed the Great Plains into Montana and the Pacific Northwest, they were often hitting campgrounds about to be shuttered for the season. “We closed down the state parks all the way across the country,” she says. “But we had a beautiful trip. It was gorgeous.”
Into the Woods
During her first few months in Seattle, she lived with Bryan while searching for interesting job opportunities. Then one day she came across a position advertised down at Pack Forest, and she felt an instant connection.
Having grown up around her family’s wooded land in Maine, Saunders–pictured here with her son Bryan–felt an immediate connection with Pack Forest.
Back home in Maine, her family has managed a 1,000-acre wood lot for generations. She grew up walking the land, going out with her grandfather and father, cutting wood and marking boundaries. “My father always had this dream that I’d be the forester in the family,” she says, and she learned to identify the conifers and firs and pines and hemlock, and all the hardwoods like maples, ash, elms and oaks. She shared the same lessons with her son, showing him changes in the forest during the seasons and as years passed. “When you walk on the land, you know it,” she says. “I can look at that forest going back 50 years now. It’s in my blood.”
So when she landed the job and moved down to Eatonville, Wash., she felt right at home among the towering woods of Pack Forest and nearby Mount Rainier National Park. She’s one of eight permanent staff members based there, helping oversee 4,300 acres of working forest, as well as conference and housing facilities. Her commute is only four miles, and she loves the familiar small town atmosphere—but also the proximity to a bigger city. “I like where I’m at,” she says. “It’s great to come to work in a place that’s absolutely stunning. I can walk out of my office and go 500 yards and be in the middle of the forest, and yet I’m only an hour and a half from Seattle.”
Saunders believes the same joy she feels at Pack Forest is what makes it such an important educational resource for SEFS and other UW departments. She’d like to see far more students come down and experience the forest, whether as part of a spring planting or summer crew, or on field trips with other courses. “There’s so much here,” she says. “It’s just a great living laboratory and classroom, and when you immerse yourself in the environment, I think it gives you a different understanding.”
Written in Ink Switching coasts after so many years as a New Englander naturally brought some huge changes. Leaving behind family has been the toughest part, she says, but she’s embraced other adjustments—like saying goodbye to black flies and swarms of mosquitoes—with a bit more gusto. Then there was the issue of Maine’s long winters of brutal cold and snow. Out here, she can handle all the mist and drizzle Seattle can wring from the sky. After all, she says, “you don’t have to shovel rain.”
Saunders and her new granddaughter, Darius.
One bittersweet irony of her relocation is that her son has since moved back to Maine. Yet then he got married and now has a brand-new 2-month-old daughter named Darius, so on balance Saunders doesn’t feel too cheated in the bargain. She loves where she is and what she’s doing, and her time together with Bryan in Seattle, though born from tragedy and more temporary than expected, became one of her most treasured periods.
In fact, she has more than memories as a keepsake from that special time.
Back when she was helping care for Bryan after the accident, she spent a great deal of time with his roommates in their house. “He was living with a group of 20-somethings,” she says. “They were incredibly amazing helping him and being really supportive, and I grew close to them.”
Among their house traditions was watching episodes of Battlestar Gallactica (BSG)—the new version, not the original television series that first aired in 1978. “I’m a real science fiction nerd,” says Saunders, “and Friday night was always BSG night. I would drive up from Eatonville to watch the show, and we’d all pile in.”
Their Friday gatherings eventually came to an end when the friends had to move out of the house. Parting wasn’t easy, so in addition to a moving-out party, they decided to come up with another way to commemorate their friendships and emotional bond: getting a group tattoo.
“Since the tattoo is on my back, I sometimes forget it’s there,” says Saunders. “I went to a chiropractor once and he commented, ‘I see you like Bonnie Tyler.’ I was impressed he could tell so much from my spine and told him so. He looked at me oddly and said, ‘I was referring to your tattoo!'”
“I’d always said I’d never get a tattoo unless it was really meaningful,” she says, but this felt like the right time. They came up with a design that has the BSG logo and the name of the house, SS AS (the “Sailing Ship Awful Shark”), and around the outside is “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which they used to play at the end of all their house parties. Everyone in the gang got the same tattoo, but they chose different body locations, depending on personal preferences. Saunders opted for the middle of her upper back. “I had to find a place that as I aged and wrinkled and sagged, it would not!”
Getting the tattoo didn’t hurt as much as she expected, but she was glad when it was over. “Believe me,” she says, “childbirth is much more painful.”
Now, anytime she catches a glimpse of her tattoo, she sees a powerful reminder of what brought her to Seattle, the friends she’s made, and priceless memories with her son. If there’s any ink you’d like to be permanent, that would probably be it.
In 2011, the USDA awarded $40 million to the Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest (AHB) consortium to develop a system to convert poplar trees into liquid biofuels. Led by the University of Washington and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), the AHB team is developing various strategies to create a renewable, direct replacement for existing fossil fuels that can be used in conventional cars, trucks and jet engines. The long-term vision is to produce 400 million gallons of biofuel per year from 400,000 acres of hybrid, sustainably-grown poplars.
Poplar plantation in Oregon.
Four poplar demonstration plantations in the Pacific Northwest are being established as part of the AHB project to optimize production of biomass feedstock. At these poplar plantations in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, AHB researchers are thoroughly assessing the plantation environmental impacts on a number of factors, such as the carbon cycle, soil, wildlife and water usage.
Part of this research includes life cycle assessment (LCA) to determine total carbon emissions associated with production and use of biofuels. One question to be resolved by the LCA is the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of biofuels, especially compared to petroleum-based fuels.
“The life cycle greenhouse gas emissions depend on many factors,” says SEFS Professor Rick Gustafson, who is leading the AHB research. He says preliminary results show that poplar-derived biofuels unquestionably lead to substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to gasoline, but the precise magnitude of the reduction has yet to be worked out. These reduced emissions result from carbon sequestration of growing poplar feedstock balancing emissions from conversion of biomass into fuel and from use of the fuel product.
As a result, producing ethanol from plantation-grown poplar trees can be nearly carbon neutral. Research by Erik Budsberg, a SEFS Ph.D. student involved in the AHB program, shows that carbon emissions from fermenting the lignocellulosic sugars directly into ethanol, and burning the residual biomass to create electricity, is balanced out by the carbon sequestered by the poplar trees and by the displacement of fossil fuel-based electricity. The downside to this process, however, is that the total product yield—80 gallons of biofuel per ton of biomass used— is somewhat low, resulting in inferior process economics and greater feedstock demands. In addition, the ethanol fuel product is not compatible with our current transportation infrastructure, making its use somewhat limited.
Erik Budsberg standing in front of year-old poplar trees at a GreenWood Resources poplar plantation in Boardman, Ore.
By using a different process, ethanol can be produced with a yield of 130 gallons per ton of biomass used. This process uses a different fermentation pathway but requires the addition of hydrogen to produce the fuel. While the yield is high—resulting in superior process economics and low biomass demand—this method has greater life cycle carbon emissions since it requires pumping natural gas, a fossil fuel, into the system. Even so, the process still results in a 60-percent reduction of greenhouse gases compared to gasoline.
A challenge of using bioethanol is that current infrastructure in the United States—most vehicles, and the fuel distribution network—is not built to handle fuels with high concentrations of ethanol, and that’s not likely to change any time soon, says Gustafson. To produce biofuels that are fully compatible with existing infrastructure, the ABH research program is developing processes that convert the poplar trees all the way to hydrocarbons, which are the molecules found in gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
“By producing hydrocarbons, we end up with greater carbon emissions when compared to producing ethanol,” says Gustafson. The process the AHB team is developing, however, will produce infrastructure-compatible hydrocarbons with good yields while still reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50 percent compared to gasoline, which is a big advancement.
It’s therefore clear that producing fuels from biomass like poplar trees leads to significant greenhouse gas emission reductions compared to petroleum-based fuel. The exact amount depends on many factors, such as the conversion process used and the choice of final products. The value of the research under way in the AHB project is that environmental benefits and impacts can be quantified before the factories are built and the feedstock plantations are established. Their research will also identify early on areas where environmental performance can be improved, enabling us to construct the most sustainable biofuels production enterprise possible.
“I’ve always been fascinated by large carnivores,” says Brian Kertson, a wildlife research scientist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). “Not just because of the physical adaptations they have, which are remarkable, but because they have to go out, search, locate, capture and kill other animals—despite the fact those animals have spent hundreds of thousands of years developing tricks to get away from them. That’s a really challenging way to live your life.”
In his role as a large carnivore researcher, Kertson often finds himself with unusually exciting dance partners.
You could argue the same about studying major predators. But that’s exactly how Kertson wants to spend his life, and he’s currently living his dream as a large carnivore researcher for the state.
Growing up in Woodinville, Wash., Kertson says he knew early on that he wanted to study wildlife. As part of a high school project, he remembers coming down to the University of Washington and visiting the College of Forest Resources (CFR). He ended up meeting Professor Dave Manuwal, head of the wildlife science program at the time, and Josh Millspaugh, a doctoral candidate who is now a professor of wildlife management at the University of Missouri.
Kertson talked with Millspaugh about his interest in wildlife and working outside, and that he was thinking of pursuing zoology in college. Millspaugh said that if Kertson really wanted to spend his career in the field and working hands-on with animals, he should consider training as a wildlife scientist.
As it happens, Kertson nearly opted for an entirely different form of training since UW had been recruiting him to play football as a defensive end or outside linebacker. Yet the call of the outdoors and wildlife research won out, and he decided to accept an academic scholarship, enrolling as a freshman at UW in the fall of 1997. “I declared a wildlife science major right out of the gate and never looked back,” he says. “It was a perfect confluence of my three real passions: wildlife, science and just being outdoors.”
CFR, now the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), would end up being his home for most of the next dozen years. He stayed on after his undergraduate degree to earn a Master of Science and then a Ph.D. in 2010, all under the same advisor, Professor Chris Grue.
An associate professor with the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, Grue is the unit leader for the Washington Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit, which funds research through a number of cooperating agencies. In Kertson’s case, his graduate
It’s hard to believe these fluffy cougar kittens will grow up into one of North America’s foremost predators.
research received support through WDFW. “Chris is a great scientist and really adept at working with a wide variety of projects,” says Kertson. “He saw me all the way through for a little more than seven years.”
Cat Scratch Fever
Looking back on his tenure at SEFS, Kertson marvels at the abundance of research outlets the school and university afforded him. It’s an urban campus yet less than an hour from forest and mountain wilderness areas, and only three hours from desert landscapes. He says access to such diverse natural laboratories helped sharpen his tools as a scientist and researcher and, most importantly, helped establish his expertise with carnivores and cougars (also known as mountain lions, pumas or panthers).
Specifically, Kertson’s dissertation involved several years of investigating cougar behavior and ecology in wildland-urban environments in Washington. He looked at how cougars use these environments—how much time they spend in residential areas, how often interactions with people occur, and how the landscape and other demographic factors influence their behavior.
His findings were rather surprising, even a bit hair-raising. “What [my research] showed was that cougars spend a lot more time in residential areas than we knew—a little more than 17 percent of their time,” he says. “Cats use these residential portions of the landscape just like they do wildlands, including hunting for deer and elk in greenbelts and other forested habitats.”
However, the average cougar generates about one report—as in, someone would spot or bump into it on a trail—every 629 days. “So coexistence levels were very high despite a relatively high level of cougar occurrence in residential areas,” he says. “All that was very new. Most work and research on cougars was in wildland environments, and this was one of the first projects to look at people as a permanent presence and a key driver in shaping landscape dynamics for cougars.”
To be clear, Kertson wasn’t talking about downtown Seattle or Bellevue or other highly urban environments. He was investigating border areas of east King County and southeast Snohomish County where residential and other developments abut or overlap with parks, forests and natural areas. The takeaway, though, was that the borders weren’t as defined as previously thought. “Unbeknownst to many of us, we share our neighborhood greenbelts, forests and trails with one of America’s foremost predators—and we’d never know it,” he says.
Despite a fearsome reputation, cougars rarely attack humans in Washington, with only 18 documented attacks since 1900 (only one of which was fatal).
That doesn’t mean you should get the willies the next time you take the trash out or stroll down the road for a latte. “The reality is, from a safety standpoint, there are a lot of things people should be way more concerned about,” says Kertson. It’s an issue of risk perception. Since 1900, there have been 18 documented cougar attacks on humans in the state of Washington, and only one of them proved fatal, way back in 1924. Plus, he says it’s helpful to remember that a key part of a cougar’s survival strategy is to minimize its exposure to people, even as it lives and hunts in fairly close proximity. So don’t expect to find a cougar curled up and purring in a sunbeam on your sidewalk.
On the Prowl
Kertson, in fact, has to work awfully hard to locate and capture cougars, and he often spends entire days in fruitless pursuit. Yet he says it never gets old when you’ve caught one of these cats and are kneeling next to it (while it’s sedated, of course). “It’s always exciting and a bit awe-inspiring, because they’re just muscles upon muscles. Big cats like cougars, I would argue they’re the epitome of predation efficiency. Everything about their body is the result of thousands of years of evolutionary adaptation to make them more efficient and effective hunters. That’s pretty incredible to see firsthand. It sort of puts you in your place in the universe.”
With such intimidating quarry, there’s plenty of thrill in the chase, too. “When I’m out doing radio tracking sessions, I’m not afraid of cougars or large carnivores,” he says, “but I have a healthy respect for them. And when you do find yourself in close proximity, even when you know exactly where they are with the radio tracking equipment, you have a very primitive, primordial reaction—your heartbeat picks up, you breathe a little quicker, your senses are a little more attuned. You hear a little better, see a little better, you’re a little more on edge. That reaction is deeply hard-wired.”
Kertson out radio tracking cougars.
Having felt that kind of pulse-pounding excitement, Kertson knew what he wanted to do after school. But when he completed his Ph.D. in 2010, a strapped state budget meant fewer opportunities in his field. He managed to secure a few months of post-graduate work funded by WDFW, and then he found an opening investigating wolf and elk dynamics as a researcher with Idaho Fish and Game. Not long after he moved to Idaho and took that job, a position finally opened up back with WDFW, so he applied and ended up getting hired and moving closer to home. Then, about four months after that, a research position with carnivores opened up in Issaquah, Wash.
The job roulette wasn’t ideal, he says, but finding the right fit isn’t always a linear process or something you can line up perfectly on a calendar. “It was kind of a funny period where I bounced around between really good jobs, but I finally had the opportunity to pursue my dream job—so I went after it and was fortunate enough to land it.”
In his role with WDFW today, Kertson doesn’t spend all of his time in the field prowling for predators. Seasonally, the winter is his busiest season for cougar capture. For much of the rest of the year, field work is interspersed with time in front of a computer analyzing data, writing reports and grants, and reviewing and providing expertise to other agency staff working with large terrestrial carnivores. Such tasks might seem mundane by comparison, but Kertson says they’re all vital parts of the scientific process. “I think my favorite part of the job is that there’re always so many new questions to be answered,” he says. “Whenever you think you’ve got a good idea of how the world works, you’re constantly surprised by what you see and what you learn.”
Husky Ties
Back in Issaquah and back in the orbit of UW, Kertson was eager to reconnect with his alma mater. Shortly after accepting his current position, he reached out to several colleagues at SEFS to obtain affiliate faculty status. Academic partnerships are common at WDFW, he says, and agency professionals are encouraged to interact with universities and mentor students as much as they can. “It’s very much a mutually beneficial relationship,” he says.
As an affiliate assistant professor, he currently sits on the committees of a few SEFS graduate students, including Laurel Peele, Justin Dillinger and Carol Bogezi, who he’s helping capture cougars in the Issaquah area.
These relationships are especially meaningful to Kertson. When he reflects on his own education and career path, he’s grateful for the insight and instruction of so many people along the way. Now he’s returning the favor. “I think the biggest factor allowing me to get where I wanted to go was utilizing the relationships and friendships I’ve made, and reaching out and creating new connections,” he says. “I was fortunate to meet the right people to point me in the right direction.”
Kertson says he doesn’t walk the woods afraid of cougars and large carnivores, but he has a “healthy respect” for them.
It’s worth noting that Kertson didn’t meet those people and make connections by accident. He pounced on research opportunities he came across as an undergrad to help broaden his skillset and network with practitioners. “A big part was early on I knew what I wanted to do, so I volunteered a lot,” he says. “That allowed me to meet people and obtain the skills that would make me more marketable. The summer before my junior year, I began volunteering on a research project with WDFW. I got to meet their staff, they got to meet me. I made sacrifices and put in a lot of work, but as a result I’ve had a lot of opportunities.”
The payoff for his persistence and opportunism came in many forms, and one of the most memorable was getting to volunteer on a field project that was way above his pay grade. “It was crazy,” he says. “As an undergraduate intern with WDFW I was assisting with black-tailed deer captures, running around in helicopters, participating in net gunning operations, running around in the forest and tackling deer to put on radio collars.”
Had he chosen to play football, he could have been tackling an entirely different type of cougar. Instead, he’s working with one of the most powerful predators in North America. He’s tracked and caught and measured close to 100 of these big cats, cradled their heads in his lap and felt the immense power of a 185-pound cougar at his fingertips. How many people get to say that?
