Lee Buckingam master's student in the College of Forestry, created a program that simulates greenhouse operations. (Photo: Nick Houtman)

When Lee Buckingham’s dad brought home a broken HP computer, Lee took it apart and fixed it. He was 15 years old.

Through high school and college, the Oregon State graduate student in Forest Engineering, Resources and Management fed his appetite for technology (“I like to build them from parts”) and taught himself to write programs.

Now, Buckingham will receive a prestigious award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for using his computer skills to assist the U.S. greenhouse industry. He will travel to Washington, D.C., in June to receive the USDA’s Excellence in Technology Transfer Award for 2012.

Buckingham created Virtual Grower, a program available online that enables greenhouse managers to estimate the costs of raising a crop by a specific date. “It’s kind of a SimCity for greenhouses,” said Buckingham, a native of Milan, Mich. “Most of the cost of raising a greenhouse crop is for heat. By specifying materials, dimensions, fuels, location and type of plant, growers can get an estimate of what it will cost them to produce a crop.”

From 2004 to 2005, he worked for the USDA in Toledo, Ohio. He received a master’s in plant ecology from UC-Riverside in 2009.

At Oregon State, Buckingham works with Professor Claire Montgomery to model forest vegetation in response to fire.

Thus was born the biofuels industry — and also the first known barbecue.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

The name of that cave, Wonderwerk, means “miracle” in the Afrikaans language, and indeed biofuels were a miracle. From cooking to heating and light, fire aided the evolution of the human race. The biofuels industry even preceded Homo sapiens and anatomically modern humans by about 800,000 years.

Over time, barbecue techniques made steady progress, achieving ultimate perfection in South Carolina pulled pork. However, despite their importance and a few innovations like fireplaces and metallurgy, biofuel technologies tended to stagnate for about 999,000 years. In the developed world, biofuels were eventually dwarfed by fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and challenged more recently by solar, nuclear, wind and even wave energy.

Now, we’ve come full circle.

Biofuels are back, hotter than ever, the source of billions of dollars in new investments. From corn ethanol to biodiesel and now forest products, biofuels are often touted as a sustainable fuel source that will lessen our dependence on imported oil and provide domestic jobs. It’s ideally seen as win-win, and researchers all over the world are trying to perfect new technologies, increase efficiency and make biofuels more cost-effective.

It has also been proposed that biofuels could help mitigate climate change — that substituting them for their fossil-fuel counterparts would reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions into the atmosphere — but that assumption is facing challenges both locally and globally.

Jet Fuel

This is not your caveman’s biofuel. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program that was announced last year will bring $80 million to Pacific Northwest industry and universities, $9.8 million of it to Oregon State University, for a diverse program of research and education to create aviation fuel out of tree plantations and low-value wood products. Through the miracle of cellulosic ethanol, some jets of the future will fly on fuel made from Pacific Northwest trees.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

“We could take material that isn’t now being used and create a new billion-dollar industry in the Pacific Northwest,” says John Sessions, a distinguished professor of forest engineering at Oregon State and principal investigator working on the Northwest Aviation Renewables Alliance.

“At the same time, we could help thin forests that are unhealthy and overcrowded, benefit wildlife habitat, reduce the risk of catastrophic fire and provide some badly needed jobs in communities that have lost their historic base in timber production,” Sessions says. “This won’t solve all of the nation’s energy concerns, and we shouldn’t say that it will. But it could make an important contribution.”

Sessions is quick to point out that “not all biofuels are created equal” and that thinning forests will cost substantially more than just using residues from existing logging operations — although the cost issue would look much better if commercial timber from small trees were harvested along with residue. One of OSU’s primary roles in the new initiative is to identify ways to get wood out of the forests more efficiently, and Sessions says that cutting logistical costs by 30 percent or more is a reasonable target.

However, questions about the modern biofuels industry have been raised almost since its inception, and as the debate enters the forest-products industry, it’s getting more intense. Cost is a big issue. So is what many ecologists consider the single most serious environmental threat in the world today — global warming, or the greenhouse effect.

Carbon Emissions

Some early proponents of biofuels suggested that they could be “carbon neutral” or even better, meaning they will not compound concerns about greenhouse warming and might even reduce it. Since they are produced from crops or trees that “sequester” carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, the theory was that sequestration would offset most or all of the carbon they release when they are turned into one type of fuel or another.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

“Different sides in this debate tend to pick the numbers that best support their arguments,” says Mark Harmon, a professor of forest science at OSU and one of 18 researchers in the nation advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on biogenic carbon. “The truth is more nuanced.”

The bottom line, Harmon says, is that almost any harvest of existing forest trees will cause a net increase of carbon to the atmosphere and that it may take decades or even centuries to “pay it back” with future tree growth. For global-warming concerns that are real and immediate, that’s a problem.

“This is a dilemma, and there won’t be any magic fix,” he says. “Forests are renewable, but only over very long time spans. Biofuels from tree harvesting would create a carbon debt that would be very difficult to pay back, like borrowing on one credit card to pay off another. The enthusiasm for them may have gotten ahead of the science.”

Harmon has estimated that, in an Oregon Coast Range stand, if you removed solid woody biofuels for the reduction of catastrophic fire risk and used them to produce cellulosic ethanol, it would take 339 years to reach a break-even point in carbon sequestration.

Another study last year at OSU, the largest and most comprehensive yet done on the effect of biofuel production from West Coast forests, echoed these concerns. It found that an emphasis on bioenergy would increase carbon-dioxide emissions from these forests at least 14 percent, if the efficiency of such operations were optimal. Harvest increases, for any reason, would result in increases in greenhouse emissions.

An analysis just published in the journal Global Change Biology/Bioenergy raised even more doubts, if forest biomass were to reach its ultimate potential. The authors, who included Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at OSU, wrote that a major global commitment to forest-biomass energy “would result in a reduction of biomass pools that may take decades to centuries to be paid back by fossil fuel substitution, if paid back at all.”

Reported emission savings from forest bioenergy are based on erroneous assumptions, they added, and a large biofuels industry would push forest management to ever-shorter rotation lengths, with depleted soil nutrients and fertility, increased erosion and flooding, and degraded fish habitat in streams. Even the economics may become more difficult, according to this analysis. In Europe, where bioenergy is subsidized, the cost of woody biomass from conifers surged in price from 300 percent to 600 percent between 2005 and 2010.

“Based on review of the literature, the paper concluded that large-scale bioenergy production from forests is neither sustainable nor greenhouse-gas neutral,” says Law, who is also a co-author of the National Research Council report on methods for quantifying and verifying greenhouse-gas emissions. “These issues have not been thought out very fully.”

By the Numbers

That’s about the same perspective held by William Jaeger, an OSU professor of agricultural and resource economics who has studied the economics of biofuels for the past five years.

“Biofuels were being seriously promoted before two main areas were thoroughly analyzed,” Jaeger says. “Those areas are net carbon analysis and economic constraints. People looked at this somewhat superficially. They said, ‘We can grow our own energy; why buy it from Saudi Arabia?’”

Biofuels, he says, were seen at first as such a win-win by most groups that they engendered almost no opposition. Political leaders loved them, environmental groups went along, jobs were being created and crop prices went up for farmers.

Under Jaeger’s analysis, however, the facts are less rosy. He analyzed ethanol produced from crops and switchgrass cellulose, including some approaches that are simpler and even less costly than the current move toward forest-based cellulosic ethanol. Jaeger concluded that existing policies have been very costly, produce negligible reductions in fossil fuel use and increased greenhouse-gas emissions.

His bottom line?

For complex reasons, the growth of a biofuel industry is doing almost nothing to reduce use of fossil fuels. And if you wanted to reduce gas consumption by 1 percent, U.S.-produced biofuels would cost 20 to 31 times more than energy-efficiency improvements. Meanwhile, the cost of taxpayer subsidies for some of these programs is extraordinary: Current ethanol subsidies to operate a 100-million-gallon ethanol plant translate to about $1 million per job, per year. Depending on the type of biofuel, there are risks of local pollution, heavier demands on land use and higher food prices for the poor.

Will some of the research being done around the world, and in the Pacific Northwest, change that? Some researchers believe it will. At least incremental improvements in efficiency and cost are probable. Whether they will be enough to offset the huge obstacles is more problematic. But while subsidizing a whole industry right now is questionable, even Jaeger points out that investment in research often has a very high payoff.

Forest Investment

“Until we work on them, we really won’t know what improved technologies will be able to do,” says Claire Montgomery, an OSU professor of forest resources. “And some of these costs have to be kept in perspective. We’re spending billions of dollars to protect our access to fossil fuels, and the cost of fire suppression in the U.S. has tripled since the mid-1990s to $1 billion a year.”

Wood or Oil?

The research cited here shows what some of those consequences, good and bad, might be when we
transform wood, a carbohydrate renewable over a scale of years to centuries, into heat or fuel.
Read more…

Other issues aside, Montgomery says, Pacific Northwest forests and rural communities are struggling. Decades of fire suppression have led to overcrowded forests, insect and disease epidemics are increasing, rural communities have high unemployment levels, and there’s little money to do anything about it. A biofuels industry could help all of these.

In her research, Montgomery is trying to identify where a supply of wood that could fuel an industry most closely matches up with the communities that need help. “Displacing fossil fuels is good,” she says. “Creating jobs is good. Helping rural communities is good.”

But a biofuels industry is not simple, certainly not as simple as once envisioned. And the issues of greenhouse warming, high societal costs and other environmental concerns are not easily dismissed.

Biofuels still make for a great barbecue. But it’s safe to say the caveman who invented this industry a million years ago had no idea, before it was all over, just how complicated the business might get.

“Compare that to getting that heat or fuel from a hydrocarbon, renewable only on a scale of many millennia. Both create jobs and cause environmental effects, and both are heavily subsidized. Where are those jobs most desired, where do environmental effects have the least impact and what subsidies are most reasonable? We can expect more to come on these questions as the research rolls in.”

When Cristina Eisenberg and her family moved to Montana in 1994, they received a warm welcome from their neighbors. On the first night in their new log cabin, they were greeted by the sonorous howls of nearby wolves.

“I had never heard wild wolves before,” Eisenberg remembers, “It was an incredibly comforting sound, a familiar sound…I felt like I’d been listening to them all my life.”

Cristina Eisenberg has performed much of her work in the Canadian Rockies. (Photo: Alana Eisenberg)

The wolves’ wails awakened a deep curiosity in her. “It was a lot different than the way wolves sound in the movies. It was almost like an ancestral remembering of a sound,” she says. She wasn’t afraid. She was intrigued.

Her desire to learn more about these animals led her to Oregon State University, where she is pursuing a doctorate in forestry. While studying with OSU conservation biologist Bill Ripple, Eisenberg focuses on how predators influence the flow of energy within ecosystems. At the center of her study is the ancient and antagonistic relationship between wolves and humans, a topic that has taken her on a journey from classical literature to the far-flung grasslands of the Rocky Mountains.

Ancient Attitudes

In the Northwest, old animosities have been rekindled as wolf packs have begun to return to the region. Oregonians had poisoned, shot and trapped the last native wolves by the 1940s. Now small wolf packs are recolonizing their ancestral homeland. According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, there are currently five wolf packs in Oregon. A lone gray wolf appeared near Crater Lake National Park at the end of October for the first time in over 70 years. Oregonians’ reactions to the wolves’ return have been mixed. Naturalists cheer their arrival, while ranchers worry about the safety of livestock.

Eisenberg understands why wolves can make us nervous. As she explains, wolves are self-willed and powerful creatures. They don’t respect human boundaries. They’re big. They kill. They resist our ability to confine and control them. Wolves personify an intrinsic human fear of wildness.

Cristina Eisenberg is the author of The Wolf's Tooth: Trophic Cascades, Keystone Predators and Biodiversity, published by Island Press in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Cristina Eisenberg)

These fears, Eisenberg explains, have driven us to drastically transform the North American continent. Over the last two hundred years, humans have altered North American ecosystems by cutting down forests, killing large predators and extinguishing forest fires. Conservation biologists term this intentional, human alteration of their natural environment “dewilding.”

“Dewilding means to take away those things that humans don’t think that they can control, like fire; deep, dark, tangled forests; and predators,” Eisenberg says. Dewilding, she adds, destroys the natural system of checks and balances that regulates the relationships between predators and prey.

Through her research, she has explored how human fears of wolves, fire and forest have shaped our management of ecosystems. She traces our modern beliefs about wolves back to ancient attitudes. Greek and Roman naturalists, including Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, wrote books depicting large predators as the embodiment of wilderness. The Romans feared both wolves and fire for their powerful, uncontrollable natures.

Europeans, she found, strengthened this link between wolves and wildness. During the Middle Ages, wolves were deemed wyldeor, the “self-willed beasts.” Again, wolves became intrinsically linked to human perception of wilderness. For a more modern view, Eisenberg turned to 20th century Swiss psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who studied how humans had internalized a fear of wildness. According to his theories, wolves perfectly fit the universal “predator” archetype: powerful, vigorous and wild. Myths and stories, such as “Peter and the Wolf,” encouraged predator removal and reinforced this archetype. When the Europeans came to North America, Eisenberg says, they carried these beliefs with them, cleared forests to create farms and killed wolves to protect their homes.

Over time, these activities greatly weakened western North American ecosystems, she adds. She learned that in 1935, fifteen years after wolves had been eradicated from the state of Washington, ecologist Olaus Murie reported that the elk population had exploded on the Olympic Peninsula. Murie observed that the elk herds had over-browsed the vegetation in their habitat and prevented the growth of new foliage. Without new trees, there was no shelter for small birds, rodents and plants. Similarly, in 1998, ecologists Michel Soule and Reed Noss concluded that over-browsing by elk had led to the disappearance of beaver from Yellowstone National Park. Numerous species which had attracted Americans to the West had dwindled due to dewilding.

Gray Wolf captured by a remote camera in Waterton Lakes National Park (Photo courtesy of Parks Canada and Cristina Eisenberg)

Driven by fear, says Eisenberg, Americans had dewilded the West without realizing the full consequences. “We thought that we would prosper if we made the continent a safe place to be. We did all of this with the best of intentions, not understanding what we were doing. It‘s counterintuitive that these big scary forces of nature — wolves, fire — are exactly the things that we need to have full, resilient ecosystems.”

Restoration Through “Rewilding”

As a conservation biologist, Eisenberg hopes that she and others can counter human dewilding with natural “rewilding.” The term “rewild” is used by conservation biologists to describe intentional human efforts to restore damaged ecosystems. Rewilding, Eisenberg says, supports North American ecosystems by promoting wildlife management policies that protect intact systems and stabilize weakened ones.

Her field work takes her to the vast grasslands of northern Montana, where she counts elk, collects wolf scat and measures aspen growth. In the meadows that she has studied, Eisenberg has found that aspen trees are returning to their areas of historic abundance. Over the years, her research has shown that the presence of wolves can transform meadows back into forests by reducing the browsing pressure on young trees. She also studies how other factors, such as the occurrence of wildfires, contribute to ecosystem health.

As wolves return to the western United States, the biodiversity of these ecosystems appears to be increasing, as shown by the research of ecologists such as OSU’s Bill Ripple. These findings give Eisenberg hope that humans can repair the ecological damages incurred over the past two hundred years. “Knowing what we do today about how beneficial wolf presence is to whole ecosystem processes, it is in our best interests to allow wolves to settle as many places as is practical,” she says.

Ultimately, Eisenberg is confident that humans can live peacefully alongside wolves. While her historical studies have shown her the challenges of wolf and human relations, she believes that humans can overcome their historic fears. Our primitive ancestors, she explains, co-evolved to live with large predators. “I believe we can coexist with far more wolves than we may think in places like Oregon and thus help realize the full ecological benefits of this natural recolonization.”

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Learn more about top predators and their influence on trophic cascades in High Alert.

Read Eisenberg’s reflection on studying wolves, On Red Owl Mountain.

But at one point, Kaichang Li, an international expert in wood chemistry and composites, and his postdoctoral research associate, Anlong Li, noticed that their adhesive seemed to be very sticky at room temperature. They tried a pretty simple experiment – rubbing some of it on a piece of paper – and quickly realized they had created a very different kind of pressure-sensitive adhesive.

Kaichang Li developed a new pressure-sensitive adhesive for potential use in a global industry with estimated revenues of $20 billion. Anlong Li (no relation), a research associate, collaborated on the project.

From that fortunate incident, the scientists proceeded through a rigorous analysis to identify a promising new adhesive material, and it has now been licensed to Avery Dennison Corporation, which will explore developing it into commercially viable pressure-sensitive adhesives. These are used in everything from consumer packaged goods labels to sticky notes and postage stamps.

“This could become a pretty amazing adhesive,” says Kaichang Li, a professor in the OSU College of Forestry. “It’s made from renewable sources and could reduce our use of petroleum products, it’s remarkably simple to make, and it could cost less than existing petrochemical-based products.”

$20 Billion Market

OSU has applied for a patent on the process, naming Kaichang Li and Anlong Li as the inventors. The licensee, Avery Dennison, is a California-based world leader in adhesive materials technology. The Fredonia Group estimates the annual global market for pressure-sensitive adhesive tapes is more than $20 billion.

“This relationship underscores the importance of working with the business community to market technologies developed at OSU,” says Brian Wall, director of the OSU Office for Commercialization and Corporate Development.

There have been previous attempts to make pressure-sensitive adhesives from vegetable oils, the researchers say, but they used the same type of polymerization chemistry as the acrylate-based, pressure-sensitive adhesives now used to make tape. That technology didn’t cost much less or perform as well.

“This new technology appears to have real promise, and we’re eager to explore its potential,” says Dave Edwards, Avery Dennison’s vice president and chief technology officer. “We want to find out if this material can be translated into adhesives that can consistently meet the high performance standards of the industry while providing ourselves and our customers with greater flexibility in terms of sourcing and options that are, additionally, more sustainable.”

Renewable Materials

Anlong Li, the research associate who collaborated with Kaichang Li in creating the new compound, says it could have many advantages. “The new material could be made of naturally renewable substances entirely. You could make this adhesive from several different vegetable oils, such as soy, linseed, canola, palm, corn or sunflower oil. The process doesn’t use any organic solvents or toxic chemicals, so it could reduce our need for petrochemicals that are being depleted and increasingly expensive. It could become very important in the global market.”

The new approach developed at OSU is based on a different type of polymerization process that offers both low cost and improved performance.

It wasn’t what the researchers set out to create.

It was even better.

Steve Strauss, OSU Distinguished Professor and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

EXZACT™ provides a versatile and comprehensive toolkit for targeted genome modification, according to the company, and has already been licensed for use in research elsewhere on algae, maize and other plants.

As part of the agreement, Strauss and his team will make modifications to essential genes for flowering and reproduction. Dow AgroSciences is providing its technology as well as access to intellectual property, to validated, high-quality compounds known as zinc-finger reagents and to scientific expertise.

“Tree biotechnology is an exciting new field for agriculture and represents an important opportunity for both traditional industries like lumber and paper and newly emerging bioenergy companies,” says Kay Kuenker, Vice President for New Business at Dow AgroSciences.

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The Society of American Foresters honored Steve Strauss in 2011 with the Barrington-Moore Memorial Award.

This LiDAR image shows a canopy height profile across a narrow transect through a 500-year-old-growth Douglas fir forest. Each dot represents a “hit” and return of a laser pulse. The colors indicate height in meters above the ground. This structural variability creates a wide range of habitats for different wildlife and plant species. (Image courtesy of Tom Spies and Keith Olsen, OSU College of Forestry)

Not long ago if you wanted to measure the height of a tree, you had to do trigonometry on the ground — or gear up for a climb. But these days you have a more sophisticated option: beaming lasers from the sky.

A revolutionary airborne technology called LiDAR (“light detection and ranging”) is making it possible to measure and map entire forests in a sliver of the time — and for a fraction of the cost — of earlier methods. By bombarding forests with hundreds of thousands of light pulses from laser equipment mounted on airplanes, OSU scientists are getting never-before-seen 3-D images of dense old-growth stands such as McDonald Forest in the Willamette Valley and H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the McKenzie River Basin. And they’re doing it for the bargain-basement price of $2 an acre (not counting computer processing, which will add at least another dollar per acre to the cost). In contrast, the cost of putting two technicians on the forest floor with notebooks and measuring tapes is about $30 an hour. At a pace of about one hour per tree, mapping a forest the size of the Andrews on foot, with its 15,000 rugged acres in the Cascades foothills, would take years, if it could be done at all. With LiDAR you can start after breakfast and have the raw data in hand before lunch.

In fields as diverse as geology, oceanography and forest ecology, LiDAR is in fierce demand.

“LiDAR is everywhere,” says Tom Spies, a research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, who has a courtesy appointment at OSU. “It’s the hot new technology, the hot stuff.”

Bound for the Crown

Boots on the ground, however, still have a role. That’s why OSU researchers have been out in the field manually double-checking the height of the Andrews’ tallest 10 or 12 trees the old-fashioned way: with a tape measure.

One cool autumn afternoon, Spies and Mark Schulze, OSU’s Andrews Forest director, stand at the foot of an ancient Douglas fir as they strap on the harnesses and snap on the carabiners they will use to leverage their body weight. With gloves and helmets secured, the College of Forestry researchers clip their ascenders onto two of the colorful nylon ropes rigged in advance by professional climbers Rob Miron and Jason Seppa of the Pacific Tree Climbing Institute. Craning their necks, they can barely see where the orange and red lines disappear into the deep-green canopy. Crowning at 280 feet, the tree towers as tall as a 25-storey building.

The scientists are soon dwarfed as they hoist themselves skyward, dangling beside pitch-stippled bark as gray and craggy as a weathered mountainside. This silent colossus was a seedling about the time Shakespeare was writing his plays.

Spies and Schulze are “ground truthing” the LiDAR readings — that is, they’re comparing the laser readings against manual measurements in order to verify the LiDAR’s accuracy.

“We use a 300-foot tape measure,” says Schulze. “We stake one end to the ground at the base of the tree and attach the other to our climbing harness and take it up in a straight line along the trunk. Eventually, we reach a point above which we’re not comfortable climbing, and use a telescoping height pole to measure the remaining distance to the tip of the crown.”

So far, accuracy has been within a whisker.

“LiDAR can measure heights to the nearest centimeter,” reports Spies.

Seeing Structure

LiDAR’s beauty, aside from being fast and cheap, is its 3-D capability. It can characterize a forest’s structure at every layer: from streambed to treetop, from open clearing to tangled undergrowth, from massive coniferous branches to twiggy deciduous boughs. Sitting at their computers, scientists can rotate the colorful LiDAR images to view the forest from an infinite number of angles.

This remote sensing tool is similar to the radar that air traffic controllers and meteorologists use to monitor jets and hurricanes, except one uses electromagnetic waves while the other uses pulses of light. Radar (originally dubbed RADAR, for “radio detection and ranging”) works by bouncing radio waves off a target to gauge its distance and position. LiDAR does the same thing with lasers, targeting anything from woodlands to coastlines to rainclouds.

For OSU’s forest research, 10 laser points per square meter are beamed to Earth from a sensor mounted beneath a small twin-engine plane owned and operated by Watershed Sciences, a Corvallis-based firm. After hitting an object — a fallen log, a rocky outcropping, a thick mesh of branches, a logging road — light from each pulse scatters backward to the sensor. This bounce-back is called an “echo.” The period of time each beam takes to return to the sensor indicates the object’s elevation. So if the beam comes back fast, that means it bounced against something tall. If it comes back later, it bounced against something lower in the forest layers, maybe even bare earth where foliage is thin. The digital images that emerge provide a comprehensive picture of forest structure unlike anything possible pre-LiDAR.

“Forest structure is key to its ecology,” says Spies. “Knowing the details of forest structure not only allows us to better predict and manage habitat for wildlife but also to understand microclimates, measure carbon and biomass, manage wildfires and design restoration efforts.”

LiDAR gives Matt Betts, OSU forest ecologist, a new view of complex habitat. By climbing into the canopy, he can compare data to direct observation. (Photo: David Stauth, OSU News and Research Communications)

OSU ecologist and wildlife biologist Matt Betts explains that “vertical structure” — how vegetation is layered throughout the forest — determines habitat selection and even survival for forest species.

“Many experts increasingly believe vertical structure is the primary driver of biodiversity,” asserts Betts, an assistant professor of forest ecosystems and society. “Researchers can often predict with considerable accuracy the diversity of birds, mammals, even insects and butterflies that will live in areas, based on what you can tell of the vertical structure of the forest.”

Transformational Technology

Forest ecologists like Spies and Betts comprise only one LiDAR user group. The current and future uses for this new tool are as vast as Oregon’s storied woods. Already, OSU geoscientists have used LiDAR to study post-tsunami landscapes in Samoa and detect hidden earthquake faults in Puget Sound. NASA is using it to estimate global carbon stocks and detect atmospheric changes across the planet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is tracking topographic changes along coastlines. The list is long and varied.

Spies goes so far as to liken LiDAR to such transformational technologies as the telescope and the microscope.

“Anytime there’s a new tool in science and research, it opens up a whole new avenue of investigation, one that you couldn’t necessarily anticipate,” he notes. “You end up discovering that it can give you answers to questions you never thought you could ask before.”

See “LiDAR Use Expands into Monitoring Biodiversity, Ecosystem Health,” OSU news release, Sept. 14, 2010

Photo by Danielle White

Any fair-minded reading of the history of the O&C (Oregon and California Railroad) lands in western Oregon would conclude that they were intended to provide economic support for the 18 counties in which they reside. We, as a country, have shifted their use to protection of owls, fish and other creatures. How do we make the counties whole? OSU senior forestry students, in their “capstone” course, have suggested a way forward.

Under the O&C Act of 1937, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Western Oregon forests shall be managed under the principle of sustained yield for the purpose of providing a permanent source of timber supply and contributing to the economic stability of local communities and industries while also considering other resources and other federal laws. Concentrated in southwest Oregon, the harvest from the 2 million acres of these forests was a major source of employment for decades. Also the counties received half of the stumpage revenue (in lieu of property taxes), an important source of income for libraries, public health and many other programs.

Legal challenges to the adequacy of BLM conservation of threatened and endangered species, especially the northern spotted owl, led to a virtual shutdown of BLM timber sales in the early1990s, followed by the Norwest Forest Plan developed by the Clinton Administration. While that plan has been praised for its focus on biodiversity, its other goal of providing a sustainable harvest of timber has not been realized. Southwest Oregon counties have been left on the edge of financial disruption. The Oregon congressional delegation has struggled to provide federal appropriations, but payments run out in 2012, and prospects for renewal are dim.

Last spring, my senior forest management class tackled this problem in two ways: 1) they developed management strategies that could provide a predictable, sustainable long-term supply of timber from these forests, and 2) they estimated the monetary value of ecosystem services from these lands that could be used as a basis of a permanent federal appropriation to the counties.

Building on the limited cases where BLM has successfully harvested timber, we focused on strategies that had immediate ecological benefits using harvest methods that might be broadly acceptable to the public. We generally rejected clearcutting and the harvest of old-growth. Rather we focused on recent science highlighting the need for forest conditions that occurred historically after large wildfires, where a significant legacy of standing trees was left and which allowed the new forest to emerge gradually from the shrubs and forbs of early successional ecosystems. Under this scenario, the O&C forests could fill a special ecological niche that our private lands generally do not provide. Student simulation of this scenario on an area of these forests south of Marys Peak suggests that they would provide a modest, but sustainable, supply of timber while contributing needed biodiversity.

Next, the students estimated the monetary value of ecosystem services from these lands focusing on carbon sequestration and recreational use. Using the current very low prices for carbon and willingness-to-pay estimates for recreational use, the students found that tens of millions of dollars of ecosystem services were being provided by the relatively small proportion of BLM’s forests south of Marys Peak.

Studies show that the thinning being done on these lands will decline in coming decades until it essentially disappears, and counties will receive virtually no income from them. That was never the intent of either the O&C mandate or the Northwest Forest Plan, but that is what’s happening. The students’ plan may be the last, best hope for long-term productive management of these lands.