Braelei Hardt (far right) explores Oregon's high desert with Honors College classmates Arthur To, Anantnoor Kaur, Lindsey Almarode. (Photo: Lindsey Almarode)

Parts of the Oregon outback are a poetic juxtaposition of passionate color scattered among charred, stalagmitic trees piercing the sky above like mighty javelins. In autumn, the understory blazes in hues of red, orange and yellow — colors that light the burnt forest as if it were once again on fire.

This scene in Central Oregon near the town of Sisters, where the Black Butte II fire of 2009 torched 630 acres of timber, may seem upsetting. But is fire only a force of terror?

John Buckhouse of the Institute of Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University says, avidly, “No!”

As a hydrologist, Buckhouse may seem like the wrong kind of expert to comment on the affairs of fire. He has, however, been studying the interconnecting effects of fire, water, and vegetation on Oregon’s rangeland ecology for years.

Buckhouse says fire is a critical element in retaining a healthy outback — and for a good reason, too. Fire has been part of Oregon’s natural cycle for thousands of years, and the land in turn has evolved to accommodate and even depend on fire. It used to ravage the area every seven to 15 years, keeping large trees like Ponderosa pines in check and burning off dead matter that would otherwise steal life-giving sun from the active plants underneath it. Lodgepole pines actually depend on fire to reproduce, for their cones only release seeds in the heat of flame.

Since the development of effective firefighting techniques, concerned citizens looking to “save” the environment have disrupted this cycle and thrown the natural order of things out of balance, according to Buckhouse. The wildly adverse effects of this intervention are just recently coming to light, he says. The worst of these involve the western juniper tree.

Buckhouse’s longtime friend and colleague Hugh Barrett has been assessing juniper in Oregon’s high desert for eight years. He explains that before firefighting, fires would keep the juniper in balance with other desert-dwelling plants. Now, without the natural fire cycle, the trees have overtaken the land.

Most desert plants conserve energy by going into dormancy during the winter. All processes, including water use, come to a halt. This allows water from winter downpours and snowstorms to seep into the ground, where it is stored until spring when the land once again returns to life.

Juniper, however, does not go dormant. This creates a huge problem when there are too many juniper trees in one area. “Usually, you would see maybe four or five old junipers in an open expanse,” Barrett explains. “Now there are maybe 20. These large trees pump 25 to 30 pounds of water out of the soil per day.” This quickly depletes the desert’s winter water reserves, leaving smaller bunchgrasses to literally die of thirst. This is extremely evident when standing next to an old juniper, for there are no shrubs at all in a 30-foot radius around the tree.

The water-sucking junipers also cause even more advanced ecological problems. The increase in tall trees provides more perches for birds of prey. With more birds of prey, there are fewer ground mammals to disperse seeds, further diminishing the brush population.

Barrett notes that in areas without junipers, bitterbrush (named for its bitter taste) grows waist high in approximately nine months. In the land’s current state, it takes five years.

Braelei Hardt atop a rock formation in the high desert. (Photo:Caity Clark)

Why are these shrubs and grasses so important? The answer comes down to water retention. For a system’s watershed to be healthy, Barrett says, it must preserve three aspects: capture, hold, and safe release. The brush in Oregon’s outback contributes to the first aspect. “It’s like arm hair,” Buckhouse explains quirkily. “The arm is the land, and the hair is the brush. If you run water over a shaved arm, like a swimmer’s arm, the water rolls off quickly. But if you have hair, the water will trickle down, curving around the obstacles, and will have more time to soak in.” More time to soak in means greater water retention and a larger storage. Without sagebrush, bitterbrush, and bunchgrasses, the water simply rolls off the land and cannot be captured.

Buckhouse and Barrett are working on a plan to reintroduce flame into the desert in the form of controlled burns, which will burn off the parasitic junipers and restore these critical shrubs. This is how fire will save water — and how the high desert may return to its former glory.

Controlled burns would not only revive the environment but also yield economic gain, Buckhouse and Barrett stress. The Ponderosa pines and juniper trees have grown so large that many of them would need to be topped for the burn to work effectively. The remains could be chipped or sold to paper companies.

Barrett, like a docile bear, lumbers toward a massive juniper and rests his hand upon it. “We shouldn’t see the world as it is,” he says, “but as it can be.”

OSU forestry student Steve Ashley has spent six summers fighting forest fires in Central Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Steve Ashley)

Which of Oregon’s abundant tree species can provide not only logs for your vacation cabin but scented oil for your afternoon massage and flavor for your evening cocktail? Juniperus occidentalis, western juniper. This hardy species – which is endemic to the dry, rocky grasslands east of the Cascades – has heartwood that is both beautiful and enduring, fragrance that is coveted for soaps and lotions, and berry-like cones that give gin its characteristic taste (indeed, the word “gin” is derived from the Dutch word for “juniper,” genever or jenever).

Despite its potential market value, this high-desert native is viewed mainly as a worrisome invader across much of Oregon’s rangeland. Its dense roots suck up gallons of water, stealing scarce moisture from sagebrush, grasses and streams. Habitat for wildlife and forage for livestock are becoming lost or degraded. Ranchers are fighting back, downing the trees with chainsaws and tractors. Much of the wood remains where it falls, unused.

From Logs to Lotions

Transforming juniper from problem to profitability is the vision of OSU forestry student Steve Ashley. Cultivating new markets for juniper products could benefit not just Oregon’s ranchers but also its mills, builders, landscapers, furniture makers, garden centers, retailers and enterprises in specialty niches such as essential oils, craft distilleries and animal bedding, he says. And then there’s the growing demand for sustainable energy. Juniper is a vast source of biomass just waiting to be tapped, Ashley asserts.

So what’s getting in the way? That’s the question Ashley explored for his senior thesis in the Wood Science and Technology program with guidance from his adviser, Scott Leavengood, director of OSU’s Wood Innovation Center. For the young man from Albany who spent boyhood summers working on the 700-acre Prineville farm where his grandfather grew mint, alfalfa and sugar beets, it’s more than just an academic question. He is constantly drawn back to the sage and rimrock and dry, desert winds of Central and Eastern Oregon. For the past six fire seasons, he’s been back out among the junipered hills battling wildfires with the U.S. Forest Service.

“Since I was a kid helping out on my grandpa’s ranch, I’ve seen the juniper grow up and take over,” Ashley says.

Reviving Ecosystems

An estimated 6.5 million acres of private and government lands in Oregon are classified as juniper savanna or juniper forest. That’s up from just 1.5 million in the 1930s. Suppression of wildfires on rangelands has allowed young seedlings to survive and flourish in recent decades. Yet despite the abundance – and landowners’ eagerness to be rid of it – juniper occupies a very small place in Oregon’s wood-products industry. Typically a short, limby tree that tapers sharply and has a swirling grain pattern, juniper is not ideal for mills, which are geared for long, straight-grained, knot-free logs, Ashley says. With only one large-scale juniper mill in the state – the nonprofit REACH (Rehabilitation, Employment and Community Housing) mill in Klamath Falls – transportation costs and logistics hinder large-scale logging.

Harvesting presents its own set of hurdles. Scattered widely and randomly across the landscape, juniper doesn’t lend itself to efficient logging like dense stands of, say, Douglas fir or ponderosa pine, Ashley explains.

But none of these impediments is impossible to overcome, according to Ashley. In his study, he makes recommendations for expediting the western juniper market, including using alternative harvesting methods such as mule or horse logging and creating a “value-added” product such as wood chips right on the harvesting site.

His vision for juniper in Oregon centers on its “green” assets.

“The ecological effects of removing western juniper have yielded great results in increasing stream flows and native grasses,” Ashley says. The ranchers he interviewed have seen “drastic ecological changes” after cutting juniper on their land. In fact, one of those ranchers, Bill McCormack of Brothers, told Ashley that “the grasses seem to grow overnight” as soon as the juniper is cut down.

Besides reviving ecosystems, harvested juniper can be used in all sorts of green products, from long-lived fence posts and landscape timbers that don’t need to be treated with chemicals to pellets for woodstoves to biofuels for energy generation.

Down to Business

For the juniper market to take off in Oregon, however, landowners, mill operators and government agents need to reach a meeting of the minds on how to move it forward, Ashley says. This “communication triangle,” he insists, must collaborate more closely to benefit all stakeholders. In the meantime, he plans to seek investment capital for a start-up company where he can put his extensive juniper knowledge to work.

“The public needs to be re-educated about western juniper,” he says. “They may be very interested in juniper products because the harvest restores ecosystems and yields ‘green’ products. Anything green is selling these days.”

To support student scholarships, contact the OSU Foundation.

Experience Oregon’s beauty and bounty through OSU research

Take a hike! Summer may have arrived a bit late in the Pacific Northwest, but you can make up for lost time by exploring public demonstration gardens, old-growth forests, wetlands, agricultural field days and an archaeological dig through OSU’s Summer of Science Google map. Each listing on the map includes directions and a description of what you’ll find.

View Oregon State University Summer of Science in a larger map

Rural landowners depend on access roads to move livestock and farm equipment. (Photo: Jesse Abrams)

Beautiful landscapes may inspire us, but it takes more than scenery to create community vitality. Wallowa County and rural communities across the country struggle with economic development, a future for their youth and the cultural tensions that arise from changing land ownership. For more than a decade, such issues in Wallowa have been addressed by Wallowa Resources, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit natural resources organizations.

“Wallowa Resources shows us what is possible. There are few places you can go in the country to get this range of innovative thinking about rural communities,” says Oregon State University forestry professor John Bliss.

So it was natural for Bliss and Associate Professor Kate MacTavish in Human Development and Family Sciences to partner with Nils Christoffersen, Wallowa Resources executive director, in the creation of an experiential learning course for OSU graduate students. Since 2005, students have spent 10 September days living with families and meeting with community leaders from Garibaldi on to the coast, to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon, to Wallowa County in the northeast corner of the state.

For students, the experience has been unforgettable. Caitlin Bell, who participated in 2008, had this to say on her final exam: “I was faced repeatedly with the formidable and humbling task of dismantling my assumptions and preconceptions and rebuilding knowledge from scratch. I learned, among many things, that rural residents are innovative, entrepreneurial, and warmly hospitable people who value community, simple living, and hard work.” Wallowa Resources reprinted her remarks in a 2009 newsletter.

The Communities and Natural Resources course has spawned student projects that arm local decision-makers with useful information about trends in education, land use, forests and other topics, adds Christoffersen. For example, two students working with MacTavish – Devora Shamah and Brooke Dolenc – surveyed Wallowa County high school students and graduates to find out what drives their aspirations. They discovered that while about a third of high school students wanted to live in Wallowa County as adults, about one quarter of graduates were actually doing so. Dolenc’s and Shamah’s reports are available online in the OSU Scholar’s Archive.

OSU’s relationship with Wallowa County is just one example of the close partnerships between the university and rural communities through Extension and agricultural experiment stations. In addition, the OSU Rural Studies Program has established formal agreements to do research in Wallowa and Tillamook counties and has been active in Lake, Coos and other counties as well.

A signature effort has been the development of “community indicators” of vitality. OSU students and faculty have collaborated with local citizens to identify markers that allow leaders to prioritize goals and evaluate progress in reaching them. Wallowa County was the focus of a recent effort led by Lena Etuk, a social demographer with OSU Extension and the College of Health and Human Sciences. With funding from the Ford Institute for Community Building, she worked with Wallowa Resources and a team of volunteers to outline 26 indicators of vitality in social, economic and environmental health and community capacity.

Reports for Oregon counties, including Tillamook and Wallowa, are available online here.

Related story: The Mythbuster

To support OSU Extension or the Rural Studies Program, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

In one of the Earth's most active fault zones, OSU geoscientist John Nabelek and colleagues are defining the forces that created Mt. Everest and threaten millions of people. (Photo courtesy of John Nabelek)

On a computer generated diagram of seismic profiles from Nepal and Tibet, John Nabelek traces a thin blue line. “That’s the interface between the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates,” he says. The earthquake-prone, mountainous terrain above it is home to an estimated 40 million people.

“It is very steep. In earthquakes, landslides come tumbling down,” says Nabelek, an associate professor in Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. “Construction is not up to par, so there, you’re looking at a huge disaster.”

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Nabelek leads an international team of scientists on a quest to understand the underlying geology of the Himalayas. In 2009, they created the most complete seismic image of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle in the region and discovered some unusual geologic features that may explain how it has evolved. The study is known as Hi-CLIMB, Himalayan-Tibetan Continental Lithosphere during Mountain Building.

“The research took us from the jungles of Nepal, with its elephants, crocodiles and rhinos, to the barren, wind-swept heights of Tibet in areas where nothing grew for hundreds of miles and there were absolutely no humans around,” Nabelek says. “That remoteness is one reason this region had never previously been completely profiled.”

Waterbed Geology

A lack of scientific consensus on how two continental plates collide has led to competing theories about the Himalayas. Some researchers have proposed that the heat generated by the collision has melted so much rock that the Tibetan plateau floats above it as though on a waterbed.

“There could be small pockets of fluid, but our study shows there are not large amounts of fluid here,” says Nabelek. “The building of Tibet is not a simple process. In part, the mountain building is similar to pushing dirt with a bulldozer, except in this case, the Indian sediments pile up into a wedge that is the lesser Himalayan mountains.”

The interface between the subducting Indian plate and the upper Himalayan and Tibetan crust is the Main Himalayan thrust fault, which reaches the surface in southern Nepal. The new images show that it extends from the surface to mid-crustal depths in central Tibet, but the shallow part of the fault sticks, leading to historically devastating mega-thrust earthquakes.

“The deep part is ductile and slips in a continuous fashion. Knowing the depth and geometry of this interface will advance research on a variety of fronts, including the interpretation of strain accumulation from GPS measurements prior to large earthquakes,” Nabelek adds. The study is continuing with funding from NSF and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Nabelek also studies the Cascadia subduction zone, in which the relatively dense Juan de Fuca plate dives beneath North America. “The advantage of working in Tibet is that you can get on top of it. You can work on it. With the Cascadia, most of the mega-thrust is offshore about 100 miles.”

His emphasis in Cascadia is in the southern portion of the Juan de Fuca plate offshore from the Oregon-California border, a region known as the Gorda Deformation. Scientists don’t yet know why so much seismic activity occurs in this area. Most of the Juan de Fuca plate is relatively calm.

In another project funded by the NSF-EarthScope program, Nabelek will use the crustal imaging techniques employed in Nepal and Tibet to study the Earth’s crust under parts of Nevada. That project is scheduled to start this summer.

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To support OSU research on Earth systems, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

OSU graduate student Jesse Abrams interviewed ranchers, homeowners, business people and local officials to understand changes unfolding in Wallowa County. (Photo courtesy of Jesse Abrams)

On the 1,300-mile drive from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Corvallis, Oregon, Jesse Abrams took a detour. It was the summer of 2007, and he was pondering his upcoming Ph.D. in forest resources. He pulled into Enterprise, Oregon, the county seat for Wallowa County in the state’s mountainous northeastern corner.

It was a homecoming of sorts. For his master’s degree at Oregon State University, Abrams had worked here in 2003 for a nonprofit organization, Wallowa Resources, spending part of his time on the county’s noxious weed program. Four years later, he had other ideas in mind. As a staff member of the Ecological Restoration Institute in Flagstaff, he had juggled the needs of the environment and community development. Now, he wanted to examine the socioeconomic and land-use changes afoot in resource-dependent rural places.

These concerns hit home in a place like Wallowa County, where 58 percent of the land is in public ownership and where farming, ranching and logging have sustained families for generations. In the 1990s, changes to federal forest management led to the closure of three local sawmills. Later, as retirees and vacation-home buyers moved in — drawn by spectacular scenery and what Abrams calls the “idyll of rural America” — land prices started to rise, making it more difficult for young families to get established.

Local Leadership

These and other trends led some to worry that the county’s heritage was threatened and that its future was in the hands of outsiders, says Abrams. “Rather than having a community’s fate decided by the federal government, special interest groups, the courts or corporations, I wanted to look at how local people can exercise leadership and determine their own future,” he says.

So in Enterprise, the student who grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, met with three Wallowa Resources representatives to discuss how his project might help the organization address some of the county’s problems and develop local solutions.

Abrams set out to define trends affecting the county’s private lands: changes in ownership, road access, grazing by livestock, forest management, weed control, hunting rights and zoning. He interviewed landowners — both newcomers and long-time residents — and talked with public officials. He analyzed past land-use patterns, land sales records and demographic trends.

OSU forestry professor John Bliss advises Abrams and praises his ability to work hand-in-glove with local people. “He convened community leaders to help him get in touch with local concerns and provide feedback. It takes a mature researcher to maintain the necessary academic independence while engaging with such an advisory group, and Jesse has been extremely effective at it,” says Bliss, holder of the Starker Chair in Private and Family Forestry.

Bliss calls Abrams a “mythbuster.” Contrary to the view that before the 1990s, populations and land uses were stable and communities autonomous, Abrams has demonstrated that Wallowa County’s economy and social networks have always been vulnerable to outside forces. “If you look at the county’s history, what defines it is not continuity but change. From the Homestead Era on, land was not just a family asset. It was a commodity. People bought it, sold it, traded it and carved it up,” says Abrams.

“What’s happening now is new in some ways. It’s the first time a significant proportion of private land in the county has been owned by people who don’t depend on forestry or agriculture for their livelihoods,” he adds.

Abrams hopes that information about past trends will contribute to efforts to manage the county’s spectacular resources. He plans to finish his project in December 2010

–Nick Houtman

Related story: Partners in Rural Vitality

To support student scholarships at OSU, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

On Mustard Seed Farms in the northern Willamette Valley, farmer Dave Brown switched over to organic methods after making a personal commitment to healthier eating. (Photo by Jan Sonnenmair)

“The organic movement has evolved from a fringe element associated with a lost generation to a core business strategy of the world’s largest corporations.”

–Reuters News Service, September 2008

When California-based Amy’s Kitchen opened a plant in Southern Oregon in 2006, the Oregon Department of Agriculture called it “a large feather in Oregon’s organic cap.” The nation’s largest producer of organic frozen foods, from complete meals to pizza, now employs about 700 full-time workers in White City. Its success is a sign that, over the last decade, organics have morphed from counterculture to mainstream.

Whether you’ve tossed a box of Amy’s enchiladas into your shopping cart, picked up salad greens from Gathering Together Farms at the local farmers market or purchased organic milk in the Fred Meyer natural foods aisle, you’re part of this fastest growing segment of American agriculture. For many Americans, anxiety about pesticide residues in their meals and contaminants in their environment prompts them to pay more at the checkout to protect their family and their planet. Until the recent economic slump, consumer sales were galloping ahead at 20 percent a year, according to the Organic Trade Association, reaching nearly $17 billion in 2006.

In Oregon, organics have taken off even faster. Between 2007 and 2008, certified organic acreage across the state shot up nearly 40 percent (from 83,000 to 115,000 acres), according to Oregon Tilth. Although that’s a fraction of the state’s 16.4 million agricultural acres, Oregon ranks eighth nationwide for number of certified organic farms. And the impact of the new ethic doesn’t stop there. Many conventional growers, too, are adopting sustainable practices to meet regulatory standards or to appeal to niche consumer markets.

True to its land grant roots, Oregon State University has a history of bringing advanced science and technologies to agriculture. Now, to help growers compete in the organic and natural foods industries, scientists are working hand-in-hand with farmers and ranchers — cranberry growers on the Pacific coast, cattle ranchers on the Zumwalt Prairie, vineyard managers near Portland, wheat farmers in the Klamath Basin — to boost yields, bolster nutrition and compound profits while eliminating chemicals that can disrupt ecosystems and threaten human health. OSU’s organic agriculture program includes 29 researchers developing methods in fruit, vegetable, dairy and livestock production.

Organic growers range from small farm to corporate. Terra takes you to a vegetable acreage in the northern Willamette Valley and a pear orchard in Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley to meet researchers working with what some are calling the “ecological farmer.” On Dave Brown’s Mustard Seed Farms and Harry & David’s Bear Creek Orchards, crops are being raised where nature intersects science.

Pheromone-scented traps help entomologist Richard Hilton and pear-orchard managers monitor how many codling moths are in the neighborhood. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Color of Earth

Dave Brown’s fields burst with color 10 months a year. From the cool greens of spring lettuce through the warm golds of winter squash, his organic farm sprouts a rainbow of nutrients. He owes the brilliance of his royal-purple broccoli and flame-orange cauliflower to the russet soils of his farm in St. Paul just north of Salem. If he can enhance the life-giving properties of that rich Willamette Valley earth, his vegetables will be bigger and brighter — and so will his business.

That’s why he’s part of an ongoing OSU study to investigate a key building block of plant growth: nitrogen.

“These studies are giving me concrete data I can work with,” says Brown, sitting at the kitchen table of 80-acre Mustard Seed Farms one drizzly day in April. “I know what’s going on in my soils.”

Framed and Bagged

West of the farmhouse a battered pickup bumps along a dirt road, jostling OSU Extension agent Nick Andrews and his assistant, Kristin Pool, en route to a study site funded by the USDA and Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. The muck-booted pair piles out and grabs armloads of gear: four-foot-square metal frames, brown paper bags, harvest knives and the obligatory rainwear. Now into their fourth year studying nitrogen in the valley, Andrews and Pool have become fixtures on Brown’s acreage.

Andrews waves his arm toward a field dotted with little red flags. “In this plot we’re growing common vetch,” he says. “Over here is a mixture of vetch and cereal rye, and over there is still more vetch, this time mixed with phacelia.” The experimental plots are “cover crops” — soil-building plants typically grown over the winter and tilled into the earth come spring. They contribute to bigger pumpkins, tastier squash, more bountiful broccoli and more nutritious cauliflower by boosting soil fertility and structure.

Wading into the dewy, knee-deep vetch, Andrews and Pool place a metal frame over a patch of plants and then, kneeling under a pewter sky, begin carefully cutting away all stalks, leaves and flowers growing inside the square. Four samples from each plot will go back to the lab at OSU’s North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora for analysis.

Benefits of Cover Crops

Farmers use grasses and broadleaf plants as cover crops, but legumes are of keen interest because of their

An OSU study to help farmers estimate nitrogen contributions from cover crops will boost yields of organic vegetables. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)

special ability, in tandem with root-dwelling microbes, to take gaseous nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a plant-available form. Scientists call this process nitrogen “fixing.” When tilled into the soil before spring planting, these nitrogen-rich crops boost productivity naturally, letting farmers save money on nitrogen fertilizers and reduce groundwater contamination. The emerald canopies, flowers of yellow, lavender and indigo, and bacteria-nurturing root nodules offer other plusses, too: pollen and nectar for bees and butterflies; habitat for ground beetles, spiders and other beneficial insects; nutrients for earthworms and microbes; suppression of weeds and control of erosion.

But just how much nitrogen vetch and other legumes (members of the pea and bean families) contribute to the soils has long been a question for farmers. “Nitrogen contributions from cover crops vary widely,” Andrews explains. “Last year, one 26-inch tall cover crop of oats and vetch supplied only 10 pounds of plant-available nitrogen per acre, but a nearby 20-inch crop with more vetch supplied 60 pounds of available nitrogen. That’s a huge difference. Growers need a simple science-based method to account for this nitrogen supply.”

That’s what the OSU study aims to do: give growers new tools for estimating nitrogen availability from cover crops. In all, the researchers are monitoring 32 plots at each of five northern Willamette Valley farms to see how well various legumes perform in diverse soil types and farming methods. Soil cores taken early-on were frozen and their nitrogen content analyzed for baseline data. Then cover crops in 20-foot by 80-foot plots were planted. After fixing nitrogen all winter, the live plants were sampled and shipped off to the lab. Then a tractor blended the remaining nitrogen-loaded plants back into the earth to become “green manure.”

Nitrate levels and vegetable crop yields will be compared against those of untreated control plots, and cumulative effects will be measured over time. Meanwhile, in OSU’s Department of Crop and Soil Science, Associate Professor Dan Sullivan and graduate student RonJon Datta are measuring the amount and timing of plant-available nitrogen released from cover crops. They are identifying “reliable predictors of plant-available nitrogen in the field.”

“Our goal,” says Andrews, “is to be able to quantify the plant-available nitrogen so farmers can, with confidence, reduce nitrogen fertilizer based on the value of the cover crop.”

After last year’s findings suggested cutting back on chicken manure for certain low-nitrogen crops, Brown got eye-popping results. “I had the most beautiful winter squash I’ve ever had,” he reports. “Big plants, big fruit.”

Andrews explains the phenomenon this way: “Some crops will suck up a lot more nitrogen than others. Sweet corn, broccoli and cauliflower are very heavy feeders. Squash, on the other hand, is a modest feeder so it doesn’t need all that manure. Too much nitrogen has actually been shown to decrease squash yield. That’s because over-fertilized plants will keep growing leaves and stems rather than fruit.”

Faith of the Seed

For Dave Brown, going organic was the culmination of a personal journey. As a longtime conventional grower who relied on chemicals to enrich soils, control weeds and kill bugs, he got interested in nutrition in the late-1980s. Synthetic insecticides, herbicides and fertilizers started to seem jarringly out of sync with his new health-conscious lifestyle. “My wife Nancy and I decided that if we lived that way personally, we should grow our crops that way, too,” he says.

So he switched to fish fertilizer. Next he junked the chemicals. Organic certification followed three years later.

Taking something small — a tiny seed, a type of vegetable, an acre of land — and maximizing its potential is what Brown is all about. He pushes the envelope on everything.

“I’m not satisfied with white cauliflower — I have to grow purple and orange and green, also,” he says. “I don’t just do red beets, I do Chioggia and gold, too. A lot of people will grow acorn squash and butternut, maybe some Kabocha and a little Delicata. But I grow 19 or 20 kinds of squash.

“If you’re gonna grow ‘em, grow ‘em all — as long as you have a market.”

Finding a market for his organic produce hasn’t cost him one sleepless night. Business is brisk. Brown sells most of his produce to Organically Grown Company, the Northwest’s largest organic wholesaler. From his modest farm on Portland’s urban fringe, his vegetables might wind up at a big chain (Whole Foods, New Seasons, Fred Meyer, Albertson’s) or they might land in a community co-op, a mom-and-pop grocery, an elegant restaurant or a funky cafe. Surpluses go to the food bank.

A deeply spiritual man (he named his farm after the Biblical parable of the mustard seed), Brown sees no contradiction in his embrace of science. To him, enhancing God’s handiwork through hard data and agricultural research just makes sense.

“I’m a numbers person,” he says. “I like to analyze things.”

Southern Oregon owes its thriving pear industry to a 100-year partnership among growers and OSU scientists. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Moth Squad

In Southern Oregon, the name Harry & David evokes a down-home setting. The company’s famous pears do originate in the bucolic reaches of Oregon’s Rogue Valley. But their trademark, Royal Riviera, tells a truer story. These regal fruits, gentled in jiggle-proof boxes, travel everywhere in the U.S. and Canada by jet and semi. Once-humble Harry & David, headquartered in Medford, is a $400 million corporation owned by the Wasserstein Group of New York City.

In this mountainous country, pears are very big business.

At Bear Creek Orchards, a Harry & David subsidiary, tens of thousands of trees in postcard-perfect symmetry grace acre upon acre of prime orchard land in Jackson County, producing not only gourmet Comice but also Bosc, Bartlett and D’Anjou for a handful of large growers and a dozen or so smaller ones. The region’s $30 million annual crop supplies one-tenth of the pears that wind up in America’s lunchboxes and salad bowls.

Rogue Valley pears, unblemished by bugs or blight, owe their perfection to a century-long partnership among growers and OSU researchers. Together, they have worked to outwit insects, fend off fungi and foil diseases that can decimate crops and destroy livelihoods. Science and technology have become indispensable allies for an industry driven by the vagaries of weather and other exigencies of nature.

New threats can emerge, quite literally, overnight.

Chief among the threats is the codling moth — a small, drab-winged pest that seems harmless until you see the ugly wormhole bored by its larva. In the old days, growers fought the moth with lead arsenate, a stomach poison. Then came the broad-spectrum pesticides — first DDT, followed by other neurotoxins such as the organophosphates, carbamates and pyrethroids — which killed everything that crawled and flew, the good bugs along with the bad. As a result, ecosystems tipped off-kilter. New pests popped up. The cycle of eradication began again.

OSU helped growers get off the overkill treadmill by introducing “integrated pest management” — using a mixture of nature-friendly tactics to keep insects in check. Thanks to research at OSU, other land grant universities and the Agricultural Research Service, Rogue Valley growers now spray host-specific viruses that target only the codling moth. And they rely heavily on pheromones — sex scents — that confuse male moths and disrupt reproduction. Exploiting nature’s own processes not only makes a lighter footprint on the Earth, it benefits the bottom line.

“You want it to be sustainable, but also profitable,” says lead entomologist Richard Hilton. “Growers are saving $100 to $150 an acre by going to a soft system. It’s significant.”

Rumors of Mites

Codling moths, along with other bugs in the “pear pest complex” — spider mites, pear psylla, San Jose scale, pear rust mites — provide regular fodder for the bimonthly brown-bags hosted by the Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center in Central Point. One noon-hour in May, OSU scientists are sitting around a long table with a spirited cross-section of industry folks: Mega-orchard managers with clipboards and briefcases from Bear Creek, Naumes (one of the nation’s largest pear growers), Associated Fruit, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. A small landowner in red suspenders. A couple of “field men” (chemical company consultants). A packinghouse rep. A visiting entomologist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Two horticulturists — one from Harry & David and the other from Suterra, a Bend-based manufacturer of pheromone monitoring and control systems — round out the group.

OSU’s 10-decade legacy of industry cooperation shows in the easy synergy among these sun-burnished men and women. Hilton, raising his voice to cut through the chatter, displays a graph pinpointing peak egg-laying and larvae-hatch days. Quickly, the banter segues to shop talk. The group parries over “bio-fix” dates derived from two competing weather models. They trade info on the latest trap designs and bio-lures. They debate labeling on sprays with formidable names (Intrepid, Assail, Centaur). They weigh in on mite management. They invoke a litany of lesser pests (blister mites, stink bugs, Oriental fruit moths, leaf rollers). An innovative transparent trap that lures moths with acetic acid and pear ester — two natural chemical compounds given off naturally by ripening fruit — gets a lot of interest. That’s because these volatile compounds lure the female moths as well as the males. A USDA patent on the design is pending.

Data fly around the room like mate-seeking moths.

As the meeting breaks up, a mysterious green worm is passed to Hilton in a test tube. “We found this in the Dugan orchard when we were scouting for OBLR (oblique-banded leaf roller),” says Kathleen McNamara, pest control adviser for Harry & David’s 28 orchards. “Can you identify it for us?” The orchardists cluster around to peer at this potential new pest.

One more worry to take back to work.

Between brown-bags, the group stays in touch over the Net instead of, as in days gone by, over the fence. E-mail lists and OSU’s interactive “pest-alert page” give growers and researchers a place to post time-sensitive messages and data to maintain their competitive edge. The mystery worm, for instance, turned out to be a pyramidal fruitworm, a “fairly minor pest,” Hilton assured the growers in a posting shortly after the brown-bag.

A Cartridge in a Pear Tree

Southern Oregon owes its thriving pear industry to a 100-year partnership among growers and OSU scientists. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

If you walk the rows of Bear Creek’s organic orchard east of Central Point, plump pears destined for gourmet gift boxes and grocery store bins aren’t the only objects hanging in the cool boughs. Look closely, and you’ll see the fruits of science and technology, as well.

Matt Borman walks beneath a bower of boughs so green they seem like something out of a touched-up photo. Stopping at Row CFI-100, the Bear Creek hort technology manager reaches into the branches and takes down an orange plastic trap shaped like a tiny pup-tent. One moth and a soldier beetle are stuck on the sticky base.

“We hang one every seven acres to lure moths with pheromones and pear ester,” Borman explains. “Our scouts check the traps once a week, and enter the numbers in a database. Along with GIS mapping and microclimate weather monitoring, we can keep tabs on moth populations and decide whether and when to spray.” As one of a mere smattering of certified organic orchards in the valley, this 34-acre plot is sprayed with a biologically based insecticide, the granulovirus pathogen (CpVG), a natural enemy of the codling moth, and with a natural clay-based product called Surround, which drives other pests from the orchard.

“We’re learning things in our organic blocks that are bleeding into our conventional blocks,” says Borman. “We’re always trying to match the site with the most sustainable and soft system we can. We’re looking for that perfect balance between effectiveness and environmental friendliness.”

Borman then points high into the tree to reveal the most dazzling of novel moth technologies — the Suterra “puffer.” When a researcher at the University of California created the first puffer from a bathroom deodorizer dispenser in the 1980s, he couldn’t have imagined where his invention would lead. The device has evolved with the revolution in electronics. In the guts of today’s battery-operated model — which looks like a nesting house for birds — a miniature computer runs software designed to trigger bursts of pheromones from an aerosol cartridge, precisely timed with biological cycles.

Here’s how it works: As moths start to emerge, but before they mate, the puffers — placed in one tree per acre — begin burping out female pheromones every 15 minutes at night when the insects are active. The male moth picks up the scent and flutters off to find the faux female. He gets confused. He flies here, he flies there. He wastes time. Meanwhile, the window for fertilization is closing. If the phony seduction can fool the male for three or four days, the females’ odds of laying fertile eggs drop steeply.

Nature Bats Last

In the Rogue Valley’s pear orchards, new science constantly drives innovation. Solutions shift as knowledge grows and as nature adapts. European growers, for instance, are scrambling to fight a new strain of codling moth resistant to overused viral sprays in Germany. Despite ever-better methods for managing pests, nature remains — will always remain — one step ahead of human ingenuity. As Richard Hilton observes, “We will never fully understand the life of an insect.”

Nitrogen got you puzzled? Learn how to estimate nitrogen from cover crops here.

To support organic agriculture research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

OSU immunotoxicologist Nancy Kerkvliet and research technician Sam Bradford use a flow cytometer to analyze cell response to chemical exposure. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Dioxin, the chemical pollutant made infamous by Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange, has long been known to suppress immune function in humans and other animals. Surprisingly, this dangerous side effect has a scientific silver lining. While studying the toxin’s health effects, researchers discovered the genetic pathway to immune system malfunction. For people who would actually benefit from suppressed immunity — those suffering from autoimmune and allergic diseases — this clue may lead to better therapies.

With $1.8 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, OSU toxicologist Nancy Kerkvliet and colleague Siva Kolluri are investigating a genetic mechanism that turns immunity on and off — the aryl hydrocarbon (AHR) receptor — in search of a non-toxic compound that activates immune-cell regulation. If found, this compound could lead to a new generation of treatment options for victims of lupus, type-1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

Watch OSU electrical engineer Ted Brekken explain the need to modify the electrical grid.

As wind turbines and solar arrays sprout up across the landscape, an urgent challenge arises: How to capture all that alternative energy for the electrical grid. Wind velocity and solar intensity vary wildly as weather changes and as seasons shift — fluctuations that are often out of sync with power demand.

With $399,973 in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, OSU engineer Ted Brekken is tackling the problem by investigating scaled-up energy storage systems to even out the variability of wind energy generation. Such systems — which he likens to giant batteries — would “buffer the peaks and valleys in wind farm production,” he says. Wind energy thus would become “more predictable, more forecastable.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

Forest landowners are beginning to take advantage of emerging carbon credit markets while scientists confirm details of the forest carbon cycle. (Photo: Eppic Photography)

As Arctic ice thins, sea levels rise and glaciers recede, Ken Faulk takes stock of his trees in the Oregon Coast Range. Last summer, he began measuring his stands of Douglas fir and white oak by pounding plastic pipes into the ground to mark the centers of circles nearly 30 feet across.

Working steadily in the soft twilight under the forest canopy, he recorded the height and diameter of every tree in each circle. It took him five days to cover 40 acres, but Faulk didn’t mind. He regards trees with the experienced eye of a man who loves the woods. “I saw old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, trees I remembered, that I had taken an interest in. It was of value to me for that alone,” he says.

He sent his data to Oregon State University forest modeler Greg Latta, who analyzes carbon offset policies for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Latta calculated that Faulk’s Douglas firs, planted in 1980 by a previous owner, were growing fast enough to absorb more than five tons of carbon per acre annually, an amount equivalent to that generated by a car driving more than 35,000 miles.

Faulk’s forest isn’t unusual. The process, known as carbon sequestration, occurs everywhere that plants grow. As they absorb carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis, trees store part of that carbon in branches, stems and roots. Not all species are alike. The oaks come in a poor second to the firs, and on Faulk’s land, they absorb only about one ton per acre.

An OSU College of Forestry alumnus and the son of a Tacoma millworker, Faulk has seen the woods from every angle – independent logging contractor, Weyerhaeuser forester, Oregon Department of Forestry inspector and now president of the Oregon Small Woodlands Association. The nonprofit organization’s 3,000 members own about 16 percent of Oregon’s 30.5 million forested acres. With help from OSU Extension, the American Forest Foundation and other organizations, OSWA has created a company, Woodlands Carbon of Salem, Oregon, to create access to carbon sequestration markets.

By the end of December, Woodlands Carbon had signed up 11 landowners who agreed, like Faulk, to tally the tons of carbon being sequestered by their woodlands. More importantly, according to OSWA’ s Mike Gaudern, it had assembled nearly 20,000 tons of carbon credits and was seeking buyers for them. Unlike with other commodities – two-by-fours or bags of wheat – you can’t take a ton of carbon home and put it in the garage. But by paying landowners to lock carbon away in the woods for a period of time, buyers can offset their own carbon emissions.

“We need to look for ways forest resources can mitigate or ameliorate undesired climate change.”

— Hal Salwasser, Dean, College of Forestry

The hope is that carbon credits can provide a boost to financially struggling landowners who are facing growing pressure to convert their lands to other uses. If Gaudern and Faulk succeed, they won’t be the first. Such deals have already been struck in California, Michigan and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

An Appetite for Carbon

Oregon has long been the nation’s mother lode for softwood lumber, but if carbon sequestration is the goal, Faulk and other forest landowners are in the right place. OSU researchers have determined that forests here are among the best in the world for absorbing carbon dioxide, the gas linked to global warming. Old-growth stands in the Coast Range and west side of the Cascades store as much or more carbon than tropical rain forests, according to studies by OSU forest scientists Mark Harmon, Beverly Law and their students. Moreover, Law and her team have found that there is enough capacity to theoretically double the amount of carbon currently stored in forests stretching from San Francisco to the Columbia River.

“Many of the mature and old forests are on public lands, so they are uniquely positioned to act as carbon reserves,” Law told a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden November 2009.

To Faulk, more capacity for carbon means opportunity. “Scientists are telling us we need to draw the carbon dioxide level down as quickly as we can,” he says. “And that’s what we’re aiming to do here. Whether we can find some buyers who will accept that concept is our next challenge.”

It is just one of many hurdles confronting forest owners and scientists who are still coming to grips with what it might mean to put a price on forest carbon. At present there is little consensus. While professional forestry groups develop standards for inventorying carbon, economists are highly skeptical that, without national carbon emissions limits, carbon-credit markets can work. Forest ecologists are evaluating the carbon consequences of forest management practices and have barely begun to consider the influence of a changing climate. And forest products engineers have shown that wood can both store carbon for long periods and reduce carbon emissions by replacing other energy-intensive building materials such as concrete and steel.

Global Accounting

“If you’re going to make policy decisions to reduce carbon emissions and to mitigate by picking up carbon on the land, you need to measure these processes and ask, ‘Are we even coming close to what we think is going on?’” says Law, a Professor of Global Change Forest Science. “‘What is the ultimate effect on the atmosphere across the globe?’ That’s a big task.” (Note: Law is a member of a National Research Council committee that released a report, Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions, March 19. Download a PDF of the report here.)

Law seems undaunted by big tasks. In 1996, she joined scientists planning a new national network that monitors the exchange of carbon dioxide between forests, shrublands and other biomes, with the atmosphere. The goal was to track carbon flows across the country – from the maple, spruce and fir of New England, to the Ponderosa pine and aspen of the West. She suggested that sensors needed to be standardized and calibrated regularly so that data could be compared and analyzed nationally. “I spoke a little too much and became the science lead,” she says, a position she holds today for the international AmeriFlux network. Law also advises climate science programs run by the federal government and the United Nations.

Closer to home, she and her OSU colleagues manage three AmeriFlux sites in Oregon – two west of Sisters and another on land owned by Starker Forests Inc. along the Marys River near Philomath. They complement atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurements at three other locations – Newport, Marys Peak and Burns – that capture changes as air flows from the coast to the Great Basin.

Hardly a molecule moves at AmeriFlux sites without being detected. Instruments monitor weather, sunlight, heat and moisture. They track carbon in the soil, water, atmosphere and even water flowing through tree sap. Data flow every half-hour via cell-phone networks to Law’s lab on the Corvallis campus where she and her team monitor the instruments. They use the data to calibrate computer models that evaluate how carbon dioxide flows in and out of the forest and how carbon remaining in the forest changes at local, regional and national scales. Scientists will need such models to achieve the most ambitious result of the recent climate talks in Copenhagen: a program to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050 and to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, particularly in tropical rain forests.

Meanwhile, the OSU professor and her collaborators have produced groundbreaking studies of Pacific Northwest forests. Some of their findings:

Fires produce less carbon emissions than previously thought. Even in a high severity fire, only about 10 percent of above-ground live carbon stocks are burned. About 60 percent of burned carbon comes from litter on the forest floor, underlying duff and mineral soil, and most of the rest comes from snags and other dead material. Less than 1 to 3 percent comes from the trunks of live trees, somewhat lower than the fraction commonly used by scientists who produce national estimates of fire emissions.

Like all living systems, forests constantly send carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, but most of it, about 70 percent on average, comes from the soil (roots and microorganisms), not tree stems and foliage.

Still, most forest carbon is stored in the soil, and 15 to 25 percent of soil carbon is long-lasting fire-produced char.

Disturbance

When it comes to carbon, Mark Harmon describes the forest as a leaky bucket. As carbon pours into the bucket through photosynthesis, it constantly leaks out through other processes, mostly decomposition and respiring plants and microbes.

It’s no different, he adds, than a bucket of water. “People tend to think that a leaky bucket can’t hold water. Well, that’s not true at all. It can, and it does. As long as there’s something coming into the bucket and the leaks aren’t mammoth, some water will accumulate. The more you pour in, the higher it will rise. The more holes you have, or leaks, the more it will go down.”

The holder of the Richardson Chair in forestry has specialized in two parts of forest carbon cycle: dead wood and the disturbances that produce it. Logging typically leaves large amounts of branches and other unsaleable material on the forest floor. In past years, much of this so-called slash was burned to “clean” the site. Harmon’s research has showed that as this wood decays, it fertilizes the regenerating forest. Leaving slash on the ground not only benefits young trees, it saves money by eliminating unnecessary work.

However, decomposition sends carbon back into the atmosphere. Harmon and Law have shown that for 15 years or more, the amount leaving a harvested site outpaces what young trees can absorb. Eventually, rapidly growing trees catch up and reverse the flow, resulting in the high rate of carbon sequestration that is occurring in Ken Faulk’s forest. But, says Harmon, forests must go through a massive carbon release before they reach that stage. “You just can’t get to the mountain peak without going through a valley,” he adds.

Harmon and colleagues demonstrated this process in a landmark study published in the journal Science in 1990. In the late 1980s, some scientists had proposed replacing old-growth forests, thought then to be stagnant, with carbon-hungry youngsters that would take more carbon out of the atmosphere. Together with OSU colleague William Ferrell and Jerry Franklin of the U.S. Forest Service, Harmon reported that replacing old-growth with young stands would in fact pump more carbon into the atmosphere, even accounting for the carbon stored in wood products. It could take at least 200 years, they concluded, for the regenerating forest to store as much carbon as the old-growth.

“You look at a tiny young forest and a massive old forest and ask which one stores more carbon. It doesn’t take much to figure this out, although it’s taken some people a really long time,” Harmon says. It’s an argument that continues to the present day and has continued to motivate research by Harmon and his students on tree mortality, decomposition and the carbon consequences of harvesting systems.

Green Wood

The carbon story doesn’t begin and end in the forest. In fact, the benefit of wood as a “green” building material goes beyond its ability to sequester carbon. It also serves as an alternative to more fossil fuel-intensive products such as aluminum, steel, concrete and plastic. “If you don’t look at what it’s displacing, you miss a big part of the story,” says Jim Wilson. “You have to look at the whole life cycle.”

For the last decade, the OSU wood scientist has worked with a national organization, the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, or CORRIM, to follow the carbon trail for wood and other industrial materials from cradle to grave. With public and private funding, CORRIM has conducted life-cycle analyses of wood products industries across the country, from softwood lumber and plywood in the Pacific Northwest and South to hardwoods in the Northeast. It has analyzed wood flooring, particle board, laminated timbers and even the adhesive resins used in engineered wood products.

A 2009 CORRIM report, Maximizing Forest Contributions to Carbon Mitigation, notes that harvesting trees more slowly to increase carbon storage in forests would be counterproductive. That’s because a smaller supply of wood products would lead builders to substitute materials that require more energy to produce, thus leading to larger carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Over time, according to the CORRIM model, the use of wood to displace other building materials keeps more carbon out of the atmosphere than would be solely stored in the forest ecosystem itself if no harvesting was done.

To reach that conclusion, Wilson and his colleagues compared typical wood-frame houses to homes built with steel framing and concrete blocks. They also assumed that wood would come from “sustainably managed” forests, not old-growth. “If they aren’t sustainable, it’s not going to work,” Wilson adds.

“The CORRIM study suggests that when we take a comprehensive look at building materials, including total energy consumption, global warming, air and water emissions and solid waste disposal, wood turns out to perform better in most categories,” Wilson says in a 2009 report, Building to Benefit the Environment, by the Oregon Forest Resources Institute.

Pork Bellies

Andrea Tuttle, board member for the nonprofit Pacific Forest Trust (PFT), put it bluntly in a recent public radio interview: “Anything you can do with a pork belly, you can do with forest carbon, in terms of cash sales, derivatives, hedge funds, portfolio mixes. It’s a legitimate product now.” The trust has arranged to sell carbon credits from a mixed redwood and Douglas-fir forest in northern California to politicians (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi), utilities and even commodities traders. It predicts that the Van Eck Forest in Humboldt County will store an additional 500,000 tons of carbon over the next century. Spurred by California’s climate change program, buyers have already paid nearly $2 million for 185,000 tons of carbon credits, according to Christine Harrison, PFT communications director. In December 2009, national energy supplier Green Mountain Energy was selling Van Eck carbon credits for $19.95 per ton.

Despite this success, economists find the idea of a carbon market hard to swallow unless there is a government policy imposing emissions limits. “Carbon is not like pork bellies,” says Andrew Plantinga, OSU professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “Since people can derive the benefits from carbon sequestration without paying for carbon credits, there are powerful incentives for them to free-ride on other people’s purchases. Unless there are restrictions on emissions, the incentives for anybody to buy carbon credits are weak.”

Even with emissions limits, a market for forest carbon suffers from three major problems, he explains. The first, known as “additionality,” stems from the fact that trees sequester carbon just by growing. Landowners need to demonstrate that their actions will cause the forest to store more carbon than it would have done on its own.

Second, he adds, carbon credits aren’t permanent. If a contract ends and landowners are free to harvest their forest or convert their land to another use, much of that carbon can be released back into the atmosphere.

Third, carbon credits can reduce tree harvests in the short term and lead to less wood available for paper, construction and other uses. That may raise prices and give other landowners an incentive to harvest their trees earlier. This so-called “leakage” problem also puts carbon back into the air.

In an analysis for The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Plantinga and Kenneth R. Richards of Indiana University suggest an alternative: an international treaty that places national limits on forest carbon emissions and requires regular accounting of carbon stocks across the globe. Such a system could avoid the pitfalls of a project-by-project approach, which was adopted in the Kyoto Protocol.

“We need to look at forestry at as broad a scale as possible,” says Plantinga. “We need to count everything. We should have a way of looking at all of the forests in the United States and relative to a (carbon) benchmark that we all agree on, determine if they go up or go down.”

A national cap on carbon emissions could provide an incentive for utilities and other emitters to buy carbon credits, such as those offered by Woodlands Carbon and Green Mountain Energy. Plantinga is currently studying the potential for policies based on emissions caps to meet the problems posed by carbon markets.

OSU news releases:

January, 2010, “Effects of forest fire on carbon, climate overestimated”

July, 2009, “Forest fire prevention efforts will lessen carbon sequestration”

July, 2009, “Northwest forests could store more carbon, help address greenhouse issues”

January, 2009, “Warmer Climate Causing Huge Increase in Tree Mortality Across the West”

January, 2007, “Nitrogen study may improve accuracy of ecological predictions”

To support the OSU College of Forestry, contact the OSU Foundation

The Hatfield and McCormack ranch families of Brothers, Oregon, have partnered with OSU for generations to improve rangeland ecology. (Photo: Mark Reed)

Winds gust lightly over the meadow, riffling the grasses and sage, carrying the sonorous tones of Angus, Hereford and Tarentaise mothers lowing at their calves. The tableau looks ripped from a TV commercial or a Hollywood set, all daubed with wildflowers and rimmed by junipered hills under cirrus skies.

But this isn’t the invention of a Madison Avenue ad agency, some “pastoral fantasy” spun by Big Agribusiness to fool consumers.

This is the real McCoy — or McCormack, actually.

The McCormack and Hatfield families of Central Oregon are known far and wide for their leadership in eco-friendly ranching. Patriarchs Doc Hatfield and Bill McCormack, whose ranches sprawl side-by-side across 100,000 acres near the one-pub town of Brothers, are charter members of a wildly successful company called Country Natural Beef. In just two decades, the co-op has grown from 14 Oregon families to 120 ranchers across the West and Hawaii. Their beef, pastured on grass and fattened in a feedlot on a pure vegetarian diet before slaughter, provides an alternative to factory-farm meat — the kind that’s been pumped with antibiotics and plumped on growth hormones, as highlighted in Food, Inc., the highly praised but controversial 2009 documentary on industrial food production.

“That’s what sustainability is all about — it’s land, people, dollars, and putting it all together.”

— Doc Hatfield

The co-op, which posted sales of $50 million for 2008, isn’t making the ranchers rich. Rather, it pays the bills and keeps the ranches solvent. And that’s OK, because money isn’t the true bottom line out on these semi-arid plains. It’s respect for the life-sustaining land. For 30 and 50 years, respectively, Oregon State University has helped the Hatfields and McCormacks hone that ethic of respect through cooperative research. In return, scientists have been granted nearly unfettered access to vast watersheds and rangelands for study.

Catch and Release

One blistering morning in July, Doc Hatfield’s black motorcycle kicks up a froth of dust along Bear Creek Road. He’s on his way to meet a group of ecologists, activists, government agents and grad students touring a long-term research site on his acreage. While waiting for stragglers to arrive, Hatfield sets his silver helmet on the seat of the BMW and snaps a few photos of a cow-studded pasture. He’s excited about its mid-summer lushness. Clearly, science-based management strategies are making a difference.

“If you’ve got good native perennial grass cover on the upper slopes, the rain soaks into the ground where it drops instead of flowing off in a gully washer,” he explains to the group gathered on the gravel road. “That stored water then flows subsurface, forming groundwater reservoirs and making the meadows wetter. That means it’s still green on the 10th of July instead of just dry cheat grass.”

This optimal water cycle is what OSU rangeland hydrologist John Buckhouse calls “capture, store and safe release.” Buckhouse, one of the stalwarts in the multigenerational bond between the university and the Central Oregon ranching community, has spent much of his 35-year career investigating the impacts, both positive and negative, of cattle on high-desert ecosystems. One winter, with the mercury hitting 20 below, he sat on the ground at Bear Creek every day for a month, insulated in long johns and “lots of woolens,” recording observations of streamside grazing behavior. Another early study asked the question, How many seasons should sown grass seed grow before you graze the pasture? Common wisdom said two years. The answer turned out to be much more complicated.

“We discovered that nothing is the same everywhere,” says Buckhouse. “That has been our mantra ever since. You have to manage on a site-specific basis — what we call a prescription basis. If you come up with a prescription that works in Brothers, Oregon, and try to apply it in Missoula, Montana, you’re probably going to be wrong.”

From Tales to Data

Buckhouse’s magnum opus is a longitudinal study devised to help Oregon ranchers catch, retain and put to use more of the region’s scant precipitation. Key to the study is the western juniper, a native tree that, in the absence of natural fire, has encroached on millions of high-desert acres. Through its dense web of roots, the juniper takes up great gallons of water. The surrounding grasses die back. Rains rush over the bare earth, sweeping away tons of soil. Fifteen years ago, there was lots of local folklore about the rangeland’s power to heal and regenerate after juniper was removed (stories like, “Gosh, I cut down a bunch of trees over at Salt Creek and a spring popped up the next year”). But there were no hard data on a watershed scale. So Buckhouse and his colleagues designed a “paired watershed” study to test the effects of a fire-mimicking treatment for halting juniper encroachment.

The experiment compares two 400-acre drainages at Camp Creek straddling the Hatfield High Desert Ranch and public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. One parcel, Jensen Canyon, serves as the “control” site — that is, it has remained untouched by the researchers. The other parcel, Mays Canyon, is the “treatment” site for juniper removal. High-tech instruments, including ultrasonic sensors and devices for remote monitoring via satellite, were installed by then-graduate student Michael Fisher and Crook County Extension scientist Tim Deboodt. Data on groundwater levels, stream velocity, snow depth, rainfall and other indicators are collected around the clock.

After 12 years of baseline data collection, young juniper trees (those that took root after Europeans arrived in the mid-1800s) were cut from Mays’ upper elevations. Downed branches were left on the slopes at diagonals to impede runoff of precipitation — a paltry 13 inches a year on average.

The results have stunned everyone. Four years after the cutting, streams that were ephemeral (flowing only after a storm) are now intermittent (flowing in tandem with recharged groundwater). Springs are gushing where once they were just gurgling. Erosion, as indicated by the depth of gullies and sediments, has slowed. And, judging by increased numbers of seed heads per clump of grass and reinvigorated species of native perennials, the improved water dynamic is translating to healthier forage. That, in turn, means more robust habitat for birds, deer, elk and other wildlife.

This ecosystem perspective is what Hatfield values most from his long-time association with OSU.

“Understanding the holistic watershed — how it all works together — has helped us improve our grazing strategy,” says the 70-year-old rancher. “That’s what sustainability is all about — it’s land, people, dollars, and putting it all together.”

Time Travel

Before you venture off Highway 20 onto the rangeland, you can grab a burger, a Bud Light and a fill-up at the weather-beaten Brothers Café. If you’re hauling a horse, you can water it at Brothers Oasis, the equine-friendly rest stop right next door.

After you leave the crush of cars and commerce in Bend 40 minutes behind, the desert can at first be disorienting in its stillness — unnerving, even, in its seeming limitlessness. For an urbanite traveling this trackless landscape for the first time, the McCormack ranch house is a welcome sight when it rises up at road’s end 20 miles from the highway.

The house, whose solid-juniper timbers once grew in the nearby hills and draws, was built a few years ago (30 friends and family framed it in one weekend) to replace the homestead where Bill moved with his parents and lived for seven decades. (Once when he was buying a pickup truck in Portland, the salesman got confused at McCormack’s answer on the loan application to the question, How many years at your current address? “What does this mean?” the salesman demanded, pointing at Bill’s penciled response, 68. “I guess he thought it was a joke,” the rancher recalls with a chuckle. “He’d never heard of anyone living in one place for 68 years.”)

Time has a different quality on the range. It stretches out long and slow, like the landscape, and curves beyond the visible horizon. Bill’s dad, who bought the family’s first 3,000 acres in 1943, counted time, not in months and years, but in seasons and generations. Among his descendants is 19-year-old Tyler. This fourth-generation McCormack, sitting beneath soaring pinewood beams with his cowboy hat poised on his knee, carries within him the genes of an Oregon pioneer — his great grandfather, a homesteader who herded sheep across the state’s south-central reaches.

The McCormacks’ intergenerational ties extend even to the family alma mater. Tyler is a Beaver, like father Jeff, grandparents Bill and Donna, and both great grandparents (class of 1923). It was Tyler’s grandfather who first welcomed OSU scientists onto his creek beds and pasturelands for study. Since then, the ranch has been a living lab for investigations on everything from watershed contamination to sage grouse habitat. The McCormacks’ ranch, like the Hatfields’, is also an open-air classroom during field trips for rangeland ecology majors.

Tyler, an agribusiness major, got his initiation into Country Natural Beef last summer when he conducted an “in-store” at a Whole Foods Market, the co-op’s biggest customer. Next to the meat counter, he fired up a hibachi and passed out samples to shoppers. “I sold a hotdog to a vegetarian,” he boasts with a grin.

These product demos let customers not only taste natural beef, but also meet ranchers face-to-face. Each ranch in the co-op has “adopted” one or two stores. Some stores run videos of their adoptive ranch so that consumers can make a visual and, they hope, emotional connection to the source of their pot roast or T-bone.

“Whatever we have to do, whatever we have to learn to keep the land sustainable for the next generation — that’s top priority,” says Tyler’s mom, Runinda “Nin” McCormack. Her voice catches with emotion. “We realize that if we don’t do it right, our kids won’t have the opportunity to come home to the family ranch and participate in something so great.

“That’s why we’re here.”

To support the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

Anita Azarenko

The head of OSU’s horticulture department has overseen organic farming methods courses and led organic certification for land at OSU’s Lewis-Brown Horticulture Research Farm near Corvallis. Azarenko and OSU Extension scientist Alexandra Stone received awards from the Oregon Organic Coalition in September.

Vaughn Walton

Entomologist Vaughn Walton studies environmentally sustainable, low-impact strategies such as mating disruption to manage filbertworm and other insects that threaten Oregon’s filbert industry. With the University of California, Washington State University and USDA, he is also working on vine leafroll virus, an emerging disease in vineyards.

Bernadine Strik

OSU’s Berry Research Program, led by Bernadine Strik, has established the world’s largest certified organic blueberry trial at a research facility. She also is evaluating weed management, organic fertilization and bed system methods on growth, yield, soil biology, weeds, diseases and profitability of organic blueberry production.

Michael Gamroth

Helping organic dairy farmers grow more nutrient-rich grasses is a goal of Mike Gamroth’s current research. Cool-season grasses, high in natural sugars, can improve traditional forages which growers supplement with expensive nutrients. In a national USDA-funded study, Gamroth also is comparing organic with conventional milk production, animal health and animal care.

Alexandra Stone

A farmer group that collaborated on organic potato studies is now working with Alex Stone and OSU vegetable breeder Jim Myers on varietal broccoli and onion trials. Stone has also researched soil amendments and cover crops, as well as biological and cultural control of plant diseases on conventional and organic farms. She leads a national Extension organic Web initiative.

Terraced rice fields in Vietnam and other tropical countries could be at risk if monsoon rains shift south. A research team including OSU geoscientist Ed Brook has reported evidence of such shifts in the distant past. See NASA's global vegetation map here. (Photo: iStockPhoto.com, Mark Weiss)

At times in the distant past, an abrupt change in climate has been associated with a shift of seasonal monsoons to the south, a new study concludes, causing more rain to fall over the oceans than in the Earth’s tropical regions, and leading to a dramatic drop in global vegetation growth.

If similar changes were to happen to the Earth’s climate today as a result of global warming — as scientists believe is possible — this might lead to drier tropics, more wildfires and declines in agricultural production in some of the world’s most heavily populated regions.

The findings were based on oxygen isotopes in air from ice cores and supported by previously published data from ancient stalagmites found in caves. They were published June 12 in the journal Science by researchers from Oregon State University, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Unexpected Consequences

The data confirming these effects were unusually compelling, researchers said.

“Changes of this type have been theorized in climate models, but we’ve never before had detailed and precise data showing such a widespread impact of abrupt climate change,” said Ed Brook, an OSU professor of geosciences. “We didn’t really expect to find such large, fast environmental changes recorded by the whole atmosphere. The data are pretty hard to ignore.”

The researchers used oxygen measurements, as recorded in air bubbles in ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, to gauge the changes taking place in vegetation during the past 100,000 years. Increases or decreases in vegetation growth can be determined by measuring the ratio of two different oxygen isotopes in air — the composition of which is essentially the same around the world at any one point in time.

Ice to Rock

They were also able to verify and confirm these measurements with data from studies of ancient stalagmites on the floors of caves in China, which can reveal rainfall levels over hundreds of thousands of years.

“Both the ice core data and the stalagmites in the caves gave us the same signal, of very dry conditions over broad areas at the same time,” Brook said. “We believe the mechanism causing this was a shift in monsoon patterns, more rain falling over the ocean instead of the land. That resulted in much lower vegetation growth in the regions affected by these monsoons, in what is now India, Southeast Asia and parts of North Africa.”

Fast Times

Previous research has determined that the climate can shift quite rapidly in some cases, in periods as short as decades or less. This study provides a barometer of how those climate changes can affect the Earth’s capacity to grow vegetation. (See a NASA map of Earth vegetation zones here.)

“Oxygen levels and their isotopic composition in the atmosphere are pretty stable; it takes a major terrestrial change to affect it very much,” Brook said. “These changes were huge. The drop in vegetation growth must have been dramatic.”

Impacts on Food

Observations of past climatic behavior are important, Brook said, but not a perfect predictor of the impact of future climatic shifts. For one thing, at times in the past when some of these changes took place, larger parts of the northern hemisphere were covered by ice. Ocean circulation patterns also can heavily influence climate and shift in ways that are not completely understood.

However, the study still points to monsoon behavior being closely linked to climate change.

“These findings highlight the sensitivity of low-latitude rainfall patterns to abrupt climate change in the high-latitude north,” the researchers wrote in their report, “with possible relevance for future rainfall and agriculture in heavily-populated monsoon regions.”

1909
Seed lab starts up on campus for research and testing.

1920
Grass seed introduced to the Willamette Valley and, by 1924, is a $1 million industry.

1929
Fluorescence test introduced to distinguish perennial from annual ryegrass species.

1937
Oregon State Agricultural College’s seed certification service begins inspection for germination rates and purity requirements.

1950
Grass seed is a $30 million industry in Oregon.

1970s
Research conducted on alternatives to open-field burning, used since the 1940s to control diseases. Studies of air movement helped farmers control smoke. Mechanical residue treatments incorporated into cropping systems.

1992-1997
Research on non-burning alternatives, crop systems and straw uses help farmers respond to a law reducing open-field burning.

1998
OSU testing of toxic compounds in straw-borne endophytes (fungi living inside plants) saves Oregon’s annual straw export market of about 300,000 tons, mostly to Japan.

2000-2005
Global grass-seed demand pushes rapid harvesting, cleaning, labeling and shipping. Redesigned seed inspection stations in the Seed Lab cut certification turnaround from 20 days to seven.

2008
725 million pounds of forage and turf-grass seed produced in Oregon, and 800,000 tons of grass straw exported off-shore for livestock feed.

For more on OSU’s grass seed research:

Scientists See Potential Problems With Using Grass Seed Straw As Livestock Feed, 11-2-07

OSU Seed Lab Busy as Oregon Farmers Harvest 2007 Grass Seed Crop, 8-24-07

Vole Population Explosion Concerns Grass Seed Growers, 6-28-05

To support OSU’s grass seed research, contact the OSU Foundation

Students enrolled in a restoration field course collect stream macro-invertebrates with Matt Shinderman, top, and Instructor Karen Allen, lower right. (Photo courtesy of Matt Shinderman)

If you had happened upon Lake Creek, a tributary of Central Oregon’s Metolius River, in the fall of 2007, you might have seen Matt Shinderman and his Ecological Field Methods students standing nearly knee-deep in the water with dip nets in hand, hovering over tic-tac-toe style grids. And you might have been puzzled when they emptied their nets into buckets and began to pick and sort through the contents.

The biologist at Oregon State University’s Cascades Campus and his students were surveying aquatic insects, or macro-invertebrates, to determine how the ecosystem was responding to the equivalent of major surgery.

“Stream macro-invertebrates are a key indicator of biological stability in systems like Lake Creek,” says Shinderman, who works closely with Matt Orr, OSU-Cascades and University of Oregon instructor of biology and ecological restoration. Collecting samples before and after the restoration efforts let Shinderman, Orr and the students know how well the insects bounced back after workers with backhoes and dump trucks restored the stream to its original shape.

Orr initiated the project in 2005 through his Restoration Field Course, and Shinderman became involved as a guest instructor. During the fall 2007 field season, Shinderman had OSU-Cascades students enrolled in another field course collect additional samples in Lake Creek. The project is a good example of UO and OSU collaboration that benefits students at the Cascades Campus and local organizations, Shinderman and Orr say.

Lake Creek was once an important spawning ground for chinook and sockeye salmon, but the construction of the Pelton Round Butte dam complex nearly 50 years ago effectively cut off all salmonid migration to it and other tributaries. In order to reintroduce native salmon and steelhead into the upper Deschutes Basin, Portland General Electric (PGE) and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, who operate the complex, determined that restoring historically important tributaries was key to their success. Lake Creek was a priority.

“The historic value was high at Lake Creek, and its status was pretty poor for habitat value,” says Shinderman, who is also a professional fly-fishing guide. Led by the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council, Deschutes National Forest and the privately owned Lake Creek Lodge, the restoration project aimed to improve fish and wildlife habitat by removing concrete, rock retaining walls and a large pond that had been built in the 1930s.

Back in the lab, Orr and his students took the lead in counting and identifying insects. Their conclusion: Populations dropped dramatically right after restoration work, but within six months, they rebounded and even showed a slight increase. Although it’s too early to say how the stream manipulation will affect insects in the long term, the data clearly show that negative impacts are short-lived.

“We’re really going to need, as with most ecological data sets, probably 10 years’ worth of data to make any reliable comparisons in terms of before and after the project,” says Shinderman. “There are so many variables that impact macro-invertebrate populations.”

The Lake Creek project has already provided a useful model of landowner and agency collaboration. “We’ve definitely gained traction as a result of Lake Creek,” Shinderman adds. “The results here have generally been positive, and they provide a great opportunity to approach private landowners in the future.”

Next up in the Deschutes Basin: Camp Polk Meadow. The U.S. Forest Service, the Deschutes Basin Land Trust, the watershed council and a private landowner plan to restore this section off Whychus Creek, which runs through an old ranch. “This is a highly disturbed system and a significant restoration,” says Shinderman. “Lake Creek helped pave the way for this project.”

— CELENE CARILLO

Now a group of researchers at Oregon State, Cornell and Howard universities; Bowdoin College; and the Conservation Fund, are undertaking a five-year quest to find creative ways of applying computer science to ecological science, bio-fuels and natural resource management. Their work is supported by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The project is led by Tom Dietterich at Oregon State with OSU colleagues Claire Montgomery and Heidi Jo Albers in forestry and Weng-Keen Wong in engineering and with Carla Gomes at Cornell.

“Many scientific fields have come to rely on rapid, large-scale computation to make major advances,” says Dietterich, “but the field of computer science has more to offer than just raw computer power. Clever algorithms (recipes for carrying out steps in the computer) have led to major advances in molecular biology and the genomics revolution as well as to advances in computational chemistry and astronomy. We hope to have a similar impact in ecology and natural resource management.”

Among the topics that scientists and engineers will pursue are fishery economics, wildlife reserves, species distribution and fuel reductions in forests.

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The Campaign for OSU
OSU news releases

• Dietterich Named AAAS Fellow (11-12-07)
• OSU Spin-Off Company Created, Acquired by Seattle Firm (7-7-06)

Illustration by Scott Laumann

When Spanish expeditions explored what is now the Santa Barbara, California, region in the 16th and 17th centuries, they found thriving native communities. Explorers’ diaries reported that the Chumash people were farming, harvesting shellfish and crafting canoes from local trees. Since then, archaeologists have documented more than 8,000 years of human habitation there.

For OSU historian Anita Guerrini such evidence of human influence on the land must be considered in modern restoration efforts, whether for salmon, marine mammals or birds such as the snowy plover.

“The goal of restoration is to create a self-sustaining environment,” says Guerrini, who came to OSU last summer as one of two holders of the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Chair in the Humanities. “You have to figure human use into it. You can’t just say, ‘OK, if we take the people out, this is what’s going to happen.’ But you can’t just take people out. You have to deal with that.”

In her previous post at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Guerrini taught in the history and environmental studies departments. She was a member and chair of UCSB’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Her focus on restoration arose unexpectedly from what started as a narrow historical study of an oceanfront reserve on the UCSB campus. Bordered by a heavily urbanized area, the land is the target of plans that include development restrictions and ecological restoration.

In the course of her study, Guerrini discovered that both she and UCSB marine ecologist Jenifer Dugan had an interest in expanding the kinds of evidence that could be used to set restoration goals. They collaborated on a three-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore the role of history in restoration.

Their report (upcoming in Restoria, edited by Marcus Hall) cites examples of dramatic coastal change and concludes that restoration should go beyond a specific set of conditions. “In this coastal context, it can only mean restoring the ecological processes, not a particular point in time,” they write. “Larger answers to the challenge of developing restoration goals for the . . . coasts of the world will require a synthesis of physical and ecological dynamics and processes, anthropology, history, sea level change, natural and cultural resources, and human population growth and needs.”

National parks, especially those that preserve history, face a similar challenge, Guerrini says. “Gettysburg is an example of this. It’s an historic but also an ecological site. How do you preserve history while making it ecologically sustainable? Do you keep the trees as they were in 1863?” she asks.

Guerrini has published on the history of European science, medicine and animal experimentation. She is currently working on a book about the groundbreaking contributions of animal anatomical studies to the study of natural history in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV. She has been a visiting fellow in Paris, Canberra and Edinburgh as well as at the OSU Center for the Humanities.

Researchers lay cable at Blue Lake Reservoir in Oregon's Cascades for an experiment measuring relative humidity during an OSU-led summer workshop. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

High-tech science got a lift last summer from a curiously low-tech device: a potato launcher.

Puzzling over the best way to string fiberoptic cable through dense, old-growth canopy, OSU scientists devised a “canon” with an air-compression gun and fishing line weighted by a starchy tuber. From a 100-foot research tower in Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a research assistant spent an afternoon in June launching lengths of Swiss-made cable through towering boughs of Douglas fir and big-leaf maple.

“We needed a projectile with a mass sufficient to place the line, something that would not be hazardous and would not light the forest on fire,” explains OSU researcher John Selker. “We tried everything – bows and arrows, slingshots. In the end, we were shooting organic, biodegradable potatoes around the forest.”

Transformative Science

Selker, a professor in the Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering, is taking ecosystem sensing to new heights with an advanced generation of high-tech cable. Today’s fiberoptics use glass strands so pure that pulses of light zip along the line with little resistance. By detecting the tiny amount of light that scatters back from the source, scientists can measure the temperature of the glass. What that means for monitoring the infinite complexities of ecosystems such as watersheds and ancient forests is an exponential increase in precision, down to hundredths of a degree. Scientists can now take measurements more frequently (every three seconds) at closer increments (every meter) across longer distances (up to five or six miles), capturing spatial structure in three dimensions. The result is an infinitely more nuanced – and thus more accurate – depiction of the natural world.

“With fiberoptics, we’re getting about 10,000 times more data than we did with traditional sensors,” says Selker, a hydrologist who studies stream dynamics. “We’ve added a whole bunch of zeroes to the precision of our measurements. This is transformative science. It’s changing how we see the world.”

Getting finer data about the temperature, relative humidity and evaporation of a stream will vastly improve resource management, Selker predicts. Indeed, warming is one of the greatest dangers threatening watersheds. That’s because fish thrive in narrow spectra of water temperature. A few degrees warmer can mean less oxygen, more pathogens and greater stress on aquatic animals. Strategies for stream protection and restoration can be more effective if based on truer readings and better models.

But for its promise to be fully realized, the novel technology needs rigorous field testing. “There are a whole lot of practical problems to be overcome,” Selker says. The sensors need to be carefully calibrated, for example, to correct for things like weld joints in the wires, “jitter” caused by stream flow and albedo (light reflection). “The history of science is littered with great measurement techniques that fizzled because of poorly run experiments,” says Selker. “We need to seed the science community with people who know how to do this.”

So Selker, along with colleagues at the University of Nevada, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the U.S. Geological Survey recently led two international workshops to test and troubleshoot fiberoptics and sensing instruments in real-life settings. The National Science Foundation’s Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science funded the sessions, which were part training, part joint problem-solving – what Selker calls “proof of concept” studies.