SEFS Associate Professor Greg Ettl was featured in a Seattle Times article about redwood forests in the Pacific Northwest. As drier conditions, rising temperatures, and wildfire impact native tree species in the region, coast redwoods may become more common due to their decay-, fire- and disease-resistant nature. In UW’s Pack Forest, Ettl leads ongoing studies comparing the growth of coast redwoods and Douglas fir. He is working to understand how redwood seedlings fare in conditions that are less common on California’s coast, such as drought and under frost. He is also looking to survey the coast redwoods and Douglas firs growing alongside each other across the state to compare their growth rates under different conditions and soil types.
Alumni Spotlight: Olivia Moskowitz
Shortly after graduating this spring, new SEFS alumna Olivia Moskowitz flew to Chicago to spend a week training for her Chicago Botanic Garden Conservation and Land Management Internship. Through a highly competitive application process, the program matches interns with federal agencies or nonprofit organizations involved in land management work. For Olivia, that meant heading to Idaho Falls, Idaho, earlier this month to begin a five-month assignment—as a full-time employee, paid by the Chicago Botanic Garden—with the U.S. Forest Service.
She’ll be working in four different national forests around the region (Caribou-Targhee, Sawtooth, Bridger-Teton and Uinta-Wasatch-Cache), and covering a big mix of projects, from collecting native seeds (like showy fleabane and horsemint) for sage-grouse habitat restoration, to conducting forest inventories, plant population scouting and GPS mapping. Some of her tasks will be completely new to her. Others will feel incredibly familiar, which isn’t surprising considering the number of lab and field experiences Olivia accumulated during her four years as an undergrad!
Olivia, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, wasted no time getting involved in university life when she arrived on campus. In her first year, in fact, she co-founded a student group, Conservation in Style, and organized a highly successful “Conservation Catwalk” to raise money to support wildlife conservation efforts for endangered species, including African elephants, through The Gabby Wild Foundation.
Though no longer involved with that group, she quickly filled her hours by exploring every opportunity as an Environmental Science and Resource Management (ESRM) major. At the end of her sophomore year in 2015, she headed down to Pack Forest to take part in the Summer Crew, a foundational internship experience that entrenched and expanded her interest in forests and field work. “That’s what started it all,” says Olivia, who also minored in Quantitative Sciences. “[Working on that crew] puts you on the right track, and it’s a whole lot of fun.”
Olivia came back energized in the fall and started working with SEFS doctoral student Matthew Aghai on his dissertation research. She had reached out to Matthew earlier in her sophomore year, and now he was able to bring her in as a lab tech. She started attending weekly lab meetings with Professor Greg Ettl and taking trips down to Pack Forest, the Cedar and Tolt River watersheds, and Cle Elum. She completed the rest of her research at the Center for Urban Horticulture overseeing and collecting data for Matthew’s greenhouse studies. “It was a lot of fun and really intense, but also probably the most valuable experience I’ve gotten,” she says. (Her research there would eventually lead to a sub-study for her capstone project this spring, “The effects of varying light and moisture levels on the growth and survival of 12 Pacific Northwest tree species.”)
Last summer, Olivia then got to work with Professor Charlie Halpern on his long-running Demonstration of Ecosystem Management Options (DEMO) study, looking at how different patterns of harvesting trees have long-term effects on the landscape. That study took her down to the Umpqua National Forest in Oregon, near Crater Lake, and also to parts of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington.
Most recently, this past quarter Olivia worked with Professor Ernesto Alvarado’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory doing a fire-risk assessment report for Washington State Parks out in Spokane. She got to spend several weekends out in the field, as well as plenty of time in the lab working on GIS, writing reports and data entry. “It was great to be a part of something directly useful, and hopefully applied,” she says. She also enjoyed the exposure to how state government works, and getting to meet stakeholders involved in the project at different levels.
Those hands-on research experiences opened doors for Olivia to get some high-level presentation experience, as well. In spring 2016 she presented preliminary results of her capstone research at the 10th IUFRO International Workshop on Uneven-aged Silviculture in Little Rock, Ark., and this May, as part of her Mary Gates Research Scholarship, she gave an oral presentation at the 2017 UW Undergraduate Research Symposium. She will also be presenting twice this summer—first in July at the Forest Regeneration In Changing Environments conference in Corvallis, Ore., and then in September at the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress in Freiburg, Germany.
Throughout these many side projects, of course, has been a steady stream of memorable classes. “I’ve made it a point to take as many ESRM classes as I can, which has resulted in very packed schedules,” she says. Among her favorites—and there are many, she says—were Professor Emeritus Tom Hinckley’s Spring Comes to the Cascades, and then Professor Jerry Franklin’s ESRM 425 field trip down in Oregon, Fire-Prone Ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest.
Now, at the end of her four years at SEFS, Olivia has some advice and encouragement for other students getting started in the program. “Get involved, and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there,” she says. “It was pretty scary to reach out to Matthew and Greg [Ettl] and know you want to get involved, but not what your role would be. But when you talk to the professors, they’ve been so helpful and encouraging, they take the whole scariness away from the process. I don’t think a lot of students realize that undergraduate research is available to them. I think it set the stage for the rest of my life, and my experience certainly wouldn’t have been as wonderful and fruitful as it’s been.”
Good luck, Olivia, and stay in touch!
Graduation photo © Karl Wirsing/SEFS; Pack Forest pic © Olivia Moskowitz; lab shot © Matthew Aghai.
Photo Gallery: Pack Forest Summer Crew Gets Underway!
On June 19, four SEFS undergrads began a nine-week internship at Pack Forest as part of the long-running Summer Crew. For the rest of summer quarter, these students—Nicole Lau, Xin Deng, Brian Chan and Joshua Clark—will be involved in a set of diverse projects while receiving hands-on field training in sustainable forest management in the 4,300 acres of Pack Forest. Graduate students Kiwoong Lee, Matthew Aghai and Emilio Vilanova, as well as Forester Jeff Kelly and Professor Greg Ettl, will be working with the interns as they develop skills from forest mensuration to species identification, tackling projects from repairing roads and trails to assisting with research installations, and also taking some field trips.
It’s a tremendous, hallowed experience in SEFS history, and you can check out some great photos from their first couple weeks of work!
Photos © Emilio Vilanova.
SEFS Students Win Academic Competition Against University of British Columbia
Twenty-four hours is all the students were given to assess the forest and develop a stewardship plan for a 35-acre, 100-plus-year-old forest tract on King County Parks land. That was the task this past weekend at the 10th Annual International Silviculture Challenge, which pitted six students from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS)—Paul Albertine, Aoife Fae, Anthony Martinez, Timothy Seaman, Chris Scelsa and Brendan Whyte—against six students from the University of British Columbia (UBC)—Devon Campbell, Alexia Constantanou, Shawna Girard, Flavie Pelletier, Codie Sundie and Cole Troughton.
Professor Greg Ettl led this year’s group for SEFS and has been involved in the challenge since its inception. In addition to Professor Larson, the UBC team was led by Professor Steve Mitchell and doctoral student Adam Polinko.
To kick off the challenge on Friday, March 3, the students—broken into two teams per university—met with King County Parks Forester Bill Loeber at noon to learn the specifics of competition. The students then spent three and a half hours taking forest measurements on the plot to inform their management plans.
David Kimmett, natural lands program manager for King County Parks, designed this year’s challenge, which asked the students to design a canopy walkway for the public, and silviculture treatments that would maintain ecological health of the forest and also provide opportunities for recreation and education. One of the key considerations was that the forest needed to provide between $100,000 to $200,000 in funds to support building the canopy walkway, and then annual revenue to maintain the facility. Another was that the canopy walk had to be constructed from materials harvested on site.
At 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 4, the four student groups presented their plans to a distinguished panel of judges, which included Loeber, King County Parks Environmental Program Manager Richard Martin, and SEFS Affiliate Professor Rolf Gersonde. The competition was close, as all of the prescriptions were strong, and the judges deliberated for more than 30 minutes. But in the end, the SEFS team of Paul Albertine, Aoife Fae, and Timothy Seaman delivered the winning plan!
Please join us congratulating these students when you see them. And students, if you’d like to participate in next year’s challenge, you can start preparing by signing up for ESRM 323 this spring!
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The Silviculture Challenge was created in 2005 when Professor Emeritus David Ford from SEFS made a phone call to Professor Bruce Larson at UBC and challenged him to an academic silviculture competition. The challenge was born out of a spirited debate as to which faculty and university possessed the best silviculture students and program. The two universities have since alternated hosting the challenge, with UBC winning the past three before SEFS broke the streak this year and returned the award plaque to our campus.
Photo © Greg Ettl.
Institute of Forest Resources Announces Four Research Grant Winners
This March, the Institute of Forest Resources awarded four grants through the McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research program, totaling $374,877 in funding. After final approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these projects will begin during the 2016 Fall Quarter and last two years, wrapping up by September 30, 2018.
Read more about the funded projects below!
Awarded Projects
1. Sustainable Development of Nanosorbents by Catalytic Graphitization of Woody Biomass for Water Remediation
PI: Professor Anthony Dichiara, SEFS
Co-PI: Professor Renata Bura, SEFS
The present research proposes the development of a simple, sustainable and scalable method to produce high-value carbon nanomaterials from woody biomass. As-prepared carbon products will be employed as adsorbents of large capacity and high binding affinity to remove pesticides from hydrological environments. This project will (i) help mitigate forest fires by limiting the accumulation of dry residues in forest lands, (ii) create new market opportunities to transform the wood manufacturing industry and reinvigorate rural communities, and (iii) minimize potential exposure to hazardous contaminants.
Award total: $109,869
2. Trophic Relationships of Reintroduced Fishers in the South Cascades
PI: Professor Laura Prugh, SEFS
In 2015, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) began reintroducing fishers (Pekania pennanti) to the South Cascades. The west coast fisher population has been proposed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (decision due by April 2016), and fisher recovery is thus a high priority in Washington. Fisher habitat use has been studied with respect to denning and rest site characteristics, but effects of forest management and stand characteristics on establishment success of reintroduced fishers remains unknown. In collaboration with agency partners, we propose to study how forest structure and management impact prey availability, competitor abundance and fisher establishment in the South Cascades.
Award total: $99,679
3. High-value Chemicals and Gasoline Additives from Pyrolysis and Upgrade of Beetle-killed Trees
PI: Professor Fernando Resende, SEFS
Co-PI: Professor Anthony Dichiara, SEFS
In this project, we will convert beetle-killed lodgepole pine into fuel additives and valuable chemicals (hydrocarbons) using a technique called ablative pyrolysis combined with an upgrading step. We developed a novel and unique system for pyrolysis of wood that has the capability of converting entire wood chips into bio-oil. This characteristic is important for mobile pyrolysis units, because it eliminates the need of grinding wood chips prior to pyrolysis.
Award total: $109,861
4. Bigleaf Maple Decline in Western Washington
PI: Professor Patrick Tobin, SEFS
Co-PI: Professor Greg Ettl, SEFS
We propose to investigate the extent and severity of a recently reported decline in bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum, in the urban and suburban forests of Western Washington, and to differentiate between possible abiotic and biotic drivers of the decline. Specifically, we propose to (1) survey the spatial extent of bigleaf maple decline (BLMD) and record associated environmental, anthropogenic, and weather conditions that are associated with BLMD presence and absence; (2) use dendrochronological techniques to analyze and compare growth rates of healthy and symptomatic trees to further differentiate the potential roles of abiotic and biotic drivers of the decline; and (3) to link the data collected under Objectives 1 and 2 with previous records of BLMD collected by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources to ascertain the spatial-temporal pattern associated with BLMD in Western Washington.
Award total: $55,468
2016 McIntire-Stennis Research Grant Winners
This fall, the SEFS Research Committee awarded five Graduate Research Augmentation Grants through the McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research program, totaling $72,209 in funding.
This special round of grants was designed to support graduate student research, with awards targeted for Spring 2016 or Summer 2016 (and with all funding to be spent in full by September 30, 2016). Read more about the funded projects below!
Awarded Projects
1. Nisqually Garry Oak Habitat: Cultural and Ecological Considerations for Successful Restoration in the Nisqually Tribal Reservation
PI: Professor Ernesto Alvarado, SEFS
Co-PI: Professor Steve Harrell, SEFS
Garry oak (Quercus garryana) ecosystems are a designated Priority Habitat for management in Washington State (Larsen and Morgan 1998). Although there are many research projects that examine how to restore Garry oak ecosystems for the purposes of establishing more habitat for endangered and threatened species like the golden paintbrush (Castilleja levisecta) and Mazama pocket gopher (Thomomys mazama), respectively (Larsen and Morgan 1998), there are few studies that look at restoration for the objective of developing an environment for the purpose of cultural restoration, specifically agroforestry. We intend to evaluate whether Garry oak ecosystem restoration for the intended purpose of cultural activities (traditional medicinal and edible plant harvests, inter-generational education) will greatly change the components of the restoration and management plan of the Garry oak ecosystem.
Award total: $13,232
2. How Do Conclusions About the Effectiveness of Fuels-reduction Treatments Vary with the Spatial Scale of Observation?
PI: Professor Jon Bakker, SEFS
Co-PI: Professor Charles Halpern, SEFS
Restoration of dry-forest ecosystems has become a prominent and very pressing natural resource issue in the western U.S. Although mechanical thinning and prescribed burning can effectively reduce fuel loads in these forests, scientists and managers remain uncertain about the ecological outcomes of these treatments. This uncertainty reflects the short time spans of most restoration studies and a limited consideration of how ecological responses vary with the spatial scale of observation. This funding will support graduate student research that explores how ecological responses to fuels-reduction treatments vary with the spatial scale of observation, and will complement ongoing research on the temporal variability of responses.
Award total: $15,114
3. Growth and Physiological Response of Native Washington Tree Species to Light and Drought: Informing Sustainable Timber Production
PI: Professor Greg Ettl, SEFS
Co-PIs: Matthew Aghai, third-year Ph.D. student at SEFS; Rolf Gersonde, affiliate assistant professor with SEFS and Seattle Public Utilities Silviculture; and Professor Sally Brown, SEFS
Intensive management of the conifer-dominated forests of the Pacific Northwest has resulted in millions of acres of largely mono-specific second- and third-growth forests. These forests have simple vertical structure and low biodiversity, and consequently much lower value of non-timber forest products. Research on establishment of underplanted trees in partial light is needed to increase structural and compositional diversification of Douglas-fir plantations undergoing conversion to multispecies stands. However, the ecology of seedling establishment under existing canopies is poorly understood. The general aim of our research is to address the need for improved structural diversity in managed forest systems through a better understanding of species-specific performance potential of underplanted seedlings. This proposal extends ongoing research; in this phase we will document physiological differences in seedling performance.
Award total: $17,004
4. A Novel Reactor for Fast Pyrolysis of Beetle-Killed Trees
PI: Professor Fernando Resende, SEFS
In this project, we will optimize the production of pyrolysis bio-oil from beetle-killed lodgepole pine using a technique called ablative pyrolysis. We developed a novel and unique system for pyrolysis of wood that has the capability of converting entire wood chips into bio-oil. This characteristic is important for mobile pyrolysis units, because it eliminates the need of grinding wood chips prior to pyrolysis.
Award total: $15,887
5. Modeling the Effects of Forest Management on Snowshoe Hare Population Dynamics in Washington at the Landscape Scale
PI: Professor Aaron Wirsing, SEFS
The Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) is already listed as Threatened in Washington and, following an ongoing status review, likely to be designated as Endangered because much of its habitat has been lost to a series of large wildfires since 2006. Lynx subsist on snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus), and it is widely acknowledged that habitat quality for lynx is tied to the availability of this prey species, so forest management with the goal of promoting lynx conservation requires an understanding of the relationship between silvicultural practices and hare abundance. Accordingly, we are requesting summer 2016 funds to complete the third and final phase of a graduate research project whose objective is to assess the impacts of forest management on hare numbers across a large landscape in north-central Washington. By sampling a network of snowshoe hare fecal pellet transects spanning protected and harvested portions of the Loomis State Forest for a third consecutive summer, we will produce a model of hare relative abundance that will enable managing agencies to tailor their harvest plans such that they promote snowshoe hare availability and, as a result, lynx population persistence.
Award total: $10,972
SEFS Students Present Forest Stewardship Plan to King County
This past spring, 14 SEFS students had the unique opportunity to partner with King County to write a forest stewardship plan for the 645-acre Black Diamond Natural Area, south of Seattle near Maple Valley. Writing the plan was the focus of a new course set up to provide applied, real-world forest management opportunities for students: Applied Forest Ecology & Management (SEFS521/ESRM490).
King County had purchased this forested land through a series of acquisitions during the past decade as part of the King County Open Space Plan. These forests, which were previously managed as industrial plantations, needed a long-term stewardship plan that aligned with King County Parks’ goals of providing recreational opportunities to the public while maintaining the social, ecological and economic functions of the forests. King County has recognized that these dense, 15- to 30-year-old Douglas-fir plantations need active management to provide quality, long-term habitat and recreation. Yet the land is right in the middle of a rapidly developing area where managing forests presents a major social challenge. So to facilitate that planning process, the county partnered with SEFS on this course—co-taught by Research Associate Derek Churchill and Associate Professor Greg Ettl—that would give students direct experience designing a stewardship plan.
Specifically, students were tasked with designing a stewardship plan and stand-level prescriptions for Douglas-fir plantations where the major uses have now shifted to mountain biking, horseback riding and trail running. The quarter was split between field sampling and inventorying forest structure, and also class sessions covering stand dynamics, variable-density thinning, logging systems, FVS modeling and landscape analysis, among other topics. With the heavy field component, students gained hands-on experience with a number of forestry concepts, including mastering the Relaskop, using density diagrams, installing inventory plots and cruising timber, as well as how concepts from forest ecology directly apply to designing forest management treatments. Throughout the quarter, students were able to draw on the expertise of Professor Emeritus Peter Schiess and several SEFS alumni, including Paul Wagner, Paul Fisher and Jeff Comnick.
Students also engaged and interacted with neighboring communities in Maple Valley that are adjacent to the project area—a sensitive social dimension that is essential to successful forest stewardship in the proximity of urban growth boundaries. These neighborly considerations hit especially close to home for one of the students, Mary Starr, who has lived in Maple Valley for four years and knows firsthand the close relationship these communities have to their natural areas. “If you can work with stakeholders to do forestry successfully here, you can do it anywhere,” says Churchill.
While each student was assigned to write a section of the final stewardship plan, Abraham Ngu, a Master of Forest Resources candidate, coordinated and edited the final plan as part of his capstone project. The course then culminated with the students giving a formal presentation of their management recommendations to county officials, including the lead environmental coordinators.
Feedback from the county was immensely positive. Officials praised the students and, perhaps most importantly, gave a sincere indication they would like to continue the collaboration. In his post-presentation email to the course instructors, Dave Kimmett, program manager of King County Parks, wrote, “Is it too soon to think about the next class? The students made a very good impression today. ”
Not too soon at all, in fact, as King County Parks administration had a follow-up meeting with SEFS Director Tom DeLuca, Ettl and Churchill this past July, paving the way for another class in the spring of 2015.
Nice work!
Photos © Sam Israel/SEFS.
“Climate of Change” Video Series Features Pack Forest, UW Farm
The University of Washington Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability office recently released its “Climate of Change” video series, which showcases a variety of sustainability programs, activities and research taking place at UW. Through four half-hour episodes, covering everything from soil to wetlands to recycling, the film series explores a number of projects on campus and at remote facilities—including, in the second episode (“Modeling Sustainability”), Pack Forest and the UW Farm!
The whole episode is very much worth watching (see below), and you can pick up the Pack Forest section about sustainable forestry around the 10th minute. After spending several hours shooting there on a sunny day this past April, the film crew captured some gorgeous footage. The final cut prominently features Professor Greg Ettl, along with a cameo from Julie Baroody, who earned her master’s from SEFS this past summer. (The UW Farm coverage begins shortly afterwards, right around the 20:50 mark, in the final section on the Campus Sustainability Fund.)
The other three episodes include “The University and the World,” “Living the Sustainability Experience,” and “Commitment to the Future.” All four videos are hosted on YouTube and are being aired on UWTV—Channel 27 in the Puget Sound region—on Sundays at 9:30 p.m.
So take a look at a couple of our programs in action!
Video © UW Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability.
Mount Rainier Institute Welcomes First Students
This past October, after a year of planning and preparation, the Mount Rainier Institute successfully conducted its first two pilot programs down at Pack Forest!
The idea first germinated with Professor Greg Ettl and the National Park Service several years ago. Since those early meetings, one of the driving forces behind the program has been John Hayes, environmental education program manager at Pack Forest. Working in close partnership with the park service and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, Hayes has been drawing up the blueprint for a residential environmental learning center that uses the natural and cultural resources of Mount Rainier National Park and Pack Forest to nurture the next generation of environmental stewards and leaders.
The program would invite school students from all backgrounds—and especially from diverse communities with limited access to parks and other natural spaces—to spend three nights at Pack Forest.
With hands-on experiments and projects within Pack and at Mount Rainier, the goal would be for students to explore science and nature, build confidence in being outdoors, generate interest in careers involving resource management, and generally cultivate a greater appreciation for resource management, national parks and the environment.
Taking Root
After so much work getting the curriculum ready for a test run, Hayes and other project partners were especially excited to welcome the first pilot group from First Creek Middle School in Tacoma—22 students, mostly 7th and 8th graders, and their teachers, Donna Chang and Deb Sanford—for a three-night stay at Pack Forest.
They arrived on October 14, and because of the government shutdown at the time, they were not allowed to visit Mount Rainier until their final morning. But the students had plenty to keep them busy in and around Pack Forest. They visited Alder Dam on the Nisqually River to see hydroelectric power in action, practiced taking photos in the forest, wrote poems, did other journaling and cultural projects, and also conducted a few forest ecology experiments. One group, for instance, looked at plant diversity in old growth compared to younger forests, while another compared wildlife between the two forest types, including doing bird surveys.
“What was special about that is they really went through the scientific process,” says Hayes. “They were given a question in the morning, developed a hypothesis, came up with some methods, collected and analyzed data, and then gave a presentation at the end of the day. They had a great time with it!”
And that was just while the sun was shining. In the evenings, in addition to enjoying campfires and songs, students learned about the history of the region, from the park service to local tribes and other historical figures, like Fay Fuller, who in 1890 became the first woman to summit Mount Rainier. On the second night, they presented their research findings at the science symposium, and on their final night they went for a night hike to explore adaptations of nocturnal animals—and also how humans react to low visibility. “It was really exciting for a lot of them to be out in the woods without flashlights,” says Hayes.
A week later, the second group, led by teachers Dan Borst and Amy Heritage, arrived from Sequoyah Middle School in Federal Way. Their experience was similar to the first group, except this time Mount Rainier National Park was fully open again, so students got to talk to park staff, visit Paradise and experience much more of the mountain. “For many of them, it was the first time they’d been to the park, and that was a pretty amazing experience,” says Hayes.
Greatly enhancing that experience were several folks from Mount Rainier National Park, starting with Park Superintendent Randy King, who has been a strong supporter from the beginning. “Our National Park Service partners were working along with us shoulder to shoulder throughout the program,” says Hayes, including education specialist Brandi Stewart, education program manager Fawn Bauer, and volunteer program manager Kevin Bacher (who took the wonderful photos featured in this story!), as well as Casey Overturf and Maureen McLean.
Another important component of the curriculum was teaching the kids about different ecosystem services nature provides, from forest products to recreation, building houses and providing jobs, cultural, spiritual and other aesthetic functions. One of the most poignant demonstrations to that effect involved doing a timber cruise and calculating the value of a stand of timber. “That was a real eye-opener for a lot of them,” says Hayes. “They never thought about how valuable forest products are to people, and how much, in a practical sense, it’s worth to cut down and harvest timber. That was contrasted throughout the week with other choices we make in managing our resources.”
Early Returns
“Given that it was pilot, nothing was perfect,” says Hayes. “We actually only did about a quarter of what we had planned to do, and there are a lot of things we will change and refine in the future. But the teachers were very positive about the experience, and many of them are already trying to organize a trip to come back next year, which is what we’re hoping for.”
Yet for a program designed to train and inspire the next generation of environmental stewards, perhaps the most promising result of the pilots was the enthusiastic reaction from the students. By the end of their few days at Pack Forest, many were openly wishing they could stay longer or come back in the summer. And in interviews with students afterwards, a number of them expressed—nearly verbatim—the messages planners hoped they’d take home.
As one student said of the overall experience: “Now that I have done this Sequoyah to Mount Rainier Institute test run thing, I won’t look at the mountain the same. I used to just look at the mountain like it was just there, and it didn’t like mean anything. But now that I’ve like actually been there and done this, I’ll like always remember the things I’ve done and that I also want to come back here, but I don’t think I can because I’m going into high school. But I want to go back to Mount Rainier someday, and I actually want to climb to the top.”
Or as another student reflected on the science projects they completed and presented at the symposium: “I liked that we put purpose to what we did. We didn’t just do it and forget about it. We like actually did something when we got back, so it wasn’t like we were just doing it, we did something with it.”
That kind of feedback has Hayes and the rest of the institute team fired up to get the program fully up and running. They’re hoping to kick off the first full season in the fall of 2014, with the target of reaching about 1,000 students in that first year.
“It’s a daunting goal,” says Hayes, “but one we’re going to push hard to try to make happen!”
Want to learn more or get involved? Contact Hayes today!
All photos © Kevin Bacher/NPS.
Grad Student Spotlight: Julie Baroody
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?’
Photos © Julie Baroody.