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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

(Photo: Karl Maasdam)

What do the following Oregon animals have in common: the northern red-legged frog, the chestnut-backed chickadee, the western pond turtle and the river otter? All fall into the traditional wildlife designation “non-game.”

“It’s a catch-all category for those species that aren’t being managed for hunting or fishing,” says OSU wildlife ecologist Bruce Dugger.

That once-undifferentiated lump of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects was reinvented in the public’s imagination thanks to an OSU-trained biologist with a vision. The year was 1979. Bob Mace was sitting in his office at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, thumbing through a thesaurus and calling out words to his secretary. He was brainstorming, searching for a term that would ascribe greater perceived value to animals like chipmunks and porcupines, songbirds and shorebirds, dolphins and whales, salamanders and lizards. “Hmm, what about ‘watchable’?” the ODFW deputy director asked. “That’s it!” his secretary exclaimed.

The watchable wildlife movement was born. It has since spread across the nation. Nearly 40 states now actively promote wildlife viewing with guidebooks, viewing sites and other programs to connect the public with animals in their woodland, wetland, freshwater or saltwater homes.

Professor Dugger is carrying on that movement as holder of the Mace Chair for Watchable Wildlife. Endowed by Bob and Phyllis Mace in 1993 along with two undergraduate scholarships, the chair in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife is a legacy to the couple’s commitment to wildlife conservation, habitat restoration and ecological research.

An expert in wetland birds, Dugger studies the habits and habitats of rare and endangered waterfowl in the Americas and Pacific islands. His current research agenda includes the dusky Canada goose, the fast-dwindling Brazilian merganser and Hawaii’s koloa ducks.

But what got Dugger started in avian science wasn’t a scarce or showy species. It was a creature both small and common. He was 12, summering with his family in the Grand Tetons, wearing waders and casting a hand-tied caddis fly across a cold river. The fish weren’t rising. Tired and frustrated, his eyes wandered to the brushy bank. A flash of color flickered. Equipped with binoculars and a Golden field guide, he made his first official bird ID: a yellow warbler.

“After that,” he recalls, “I found myself spending more time chasing the birds in the bushes than the fish in rivers.”

Public outreach, including the cultivation of “citizen scientists” — volunteers who collect data for researchers — is a central mission of the Mace endowment. To that end, Dugger is dovetailing with OSU’s Oregon Explorer Web site to create a portal for watchable wildlife: one-click access to viewing opportunities statewide.

“Before the 1960s and ’70s, hardly anyone cared about frogs and dragonflies,” Dugger says. “Bob Mace helped change the way people think about small animals.”

Learn more about opportunities to view wildlife and participate in research at Bruce Dugger’s Web site, fw.oregonstate.edu/Dugger