The Pringle Falls Experimental Forest

The summer is warm and sunny in Corvallis, but my travels draw me east. Over and past the Cascades is an open land where the cold sparkling waters of a river flow north, and the sweet smell of Ponderosa pine blends with the fresh scent of lodgepole — the Deschutes National Forest. My one-person tent is packed in the back of a white state-owned pick-up truck with the essentials: a sleeping bag, a GPS unit, a camera, some protein bars, lots of buffalo jerky, a “Rite in the Rain” notebook and a pencil, a brown backpack, a bright orange hard hat and a soil corer.

In the late afternoon, I arrive at the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest and set up camp. The Forest Service cabins are nestled next to the gurgling and gushing Deschutes, whose French name means “River of the Falls.” The sounds of the rapids downstream bring a sense of calmness to my spirit. At the campsite, the ground is laden with pinecones, and the pine drops (Pterospera andromedea) expose themselves above the dead needles, branches and other forest litter. I unpack my gear and prepare for an early start out to the field sites the next day.

Mixed stands of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine dominate the Pringle Falls forest.

As you might guess, this isn’t the typical camping trip. I am embarking on an expedition. As a graduate student in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, I am exploring something that lurks in the soils of Central Oregon — a fuzzy microscopic fungus that colonizes tree roots and might predict the future of the forest.

But why is the future of the forest at stake, and why dig underground when we are concerned about trees? The answer lies in the effects that organisms have on one another in a forest ecosystem. Like intricate underground machinery, fungi connect life-giving nutrients in the soil to roots that transport water and food to tree trunk, branch and leaf. Trees connect to climate and wildlife in an environment that evolves over time.

In the near future, scientists expect that climate will change and our forests will adapt. Tree zones will shift and a valuable tree species in the Deschutes National Forest — lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) — is predicted to decline. This change will affect people as well. Native Americans used the long, straight and lightweight poles to build teepees. Today we commercially harvest lodgepole for telephone poles and fences. Big-game animals, such as deer and elk, use lodgepole as habitat.

Pine drops

Researchers at Oregon State University suggest that, as the climate warms, lodgepole pine will decline in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the 21^st century. As a result, Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) may be able to migrate into lodgepole zones. But this migration is dependent on the distribution or co-migration of mycorrhizae (fungi that live on tree roots), which are largely unexplored in Central and Eastern Oregon. The question is: Will this migration will be successful?

To answer that question, it helps to know a little about an ancient relationship. Scientists think that mycorrhizae, the fungus colonizing tree roots, evolved with land plants. Fungi and plants have been together since the Devonian period, which began more than 400 million years ago. External root fungi, otherwise known as ectomycorrhizae, form a sheath on the exterior of tree roots. These artful fungi form symbiotic, or beneficial, relationships with their host. Once colonization is complete, they send out filaments, which mine the soil for water and essential nutrients such as nitrogen.

Ultimately, it comes down to a trade that the tree host must submit to: The tree provides carbon, in the form of sugars, to the fungus in exchange for nutrients. The relationship is essential for the host and fungus to have the highest degree of success in the ecosystem — in this case, an ecosystem that I have the privilege to explore.

Getting to the core

The author takes a soil core.

The morning sun is bright in Central Oregon, but the air is cold and crisp. On my drive to the field sites, I can see the white peaks of Three Sisters in the distance. I pull the truck into the first site, take out my maps and venture out into the forest.  My leather boots softly crunch on the dried pine needles covering the soil. I pound my soil corer into the ground making sure to take a sample of the top 15 centimeters  (about six inches) of soil. I take in the smell of fresh earth, as I unscrew the metal corer to reveal a rich brown cylindrical soil core made up of pumice, fine roots and the mycorrhizae, too small to be seen with the naked eye. I dump the dirt, fine roots and all, into a Ziploc bag and place it in my backpack for analysis.

In the lab in Corvallis, I use molecular technology, such as DNA tests, to identify the root fungi of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine. I extract DNA, compare it to mushroom DNA in a database and identify the suspects. Like a detective, I name the species and unearth the world that had lain unexamined beneath the soil. And suddenly, this underground community is less of a mystery.

Russula

Cortinarius

My analysis reveals a diversity of species: Cenococcum, a black crusty fungus that doesn’t form mushrooms; Rhizopogon, which often forms subterranean truffles; and typical mushroom producers Cortinarius, Russula and Inocybe. It also reveals that the fungal community connected to Ponderosa pine and lodgepole overlap. That means that, when it comes to soil biology at least, Ponderosa will have a high chance of survival if it migrates into a lodgepole zone.

As the climate warms and the tree zones shift, the forest where we recreate and connect with nature may not be as we remember it. The warming climate might diminish one valuable member of the community, but forests know how to persist. By looking at underground fungi, we can determine whether trees have the potential to migrate into new zones and succeed. In the future, the smell of lodgepole pine might be absent from the breeze and the long skinny poles will be no more. Instead, the presence of underground fungi suggests that we might become immersed in the rich mahogany bark and sweet scent of Ponderosa.

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Editor’s note: Maria Garcia is a master’s student working with Jane E. Smith, research botanist in the USDA Forest Service. Garcia’s research is supported by the Forest Service and by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Stuart Sarbacker teaches on the theory, history and practice of yoga at Oregon State University. Listen to a podcast with Sarbacker.  (Photo: Theresa Hogue)

For many people, yoga is a form of relaxation. But in India, the birthplace of the exercise, yoga is beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of one’s self and into the ecological realm. A new movement called “Green Yoga” encourages men and women who practice yoga — called yogis and yoginis — to strive for bettering their environment.

Green Yoga was pioneered by an influential Indian figure, Swami Ramdev. Stuart Sarbacker, assistant professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, has studied Ramdev, who hosts a daily show in India combining yoga and activism. He has attracted some 250 million viewers of all ages.

“Part of what drew me to study Swami Ramdev is this notion that inner transformation should be reflected outwards in some sort of transformation of the external world,” says Sarbacker. This idea is paramount in Green Yoga as well.

“What happens on the mat, so to speak, should translate into a transformed relationship with the world. That transformation may be reflected through personal choices, such as choosing organic foods, or it might mean buying a yoga mat made from natural rubber instead of plastic,” Sarbacker adds.

But Green Yoga doesn’t stop at consumer goods. Ramdev has used the practice to establish landmark status and protection for the heavily polluted Ganges River. Previously it was believed that the Ganges could not become dirty despite the dumping of untreated sewage and chemicals. But through non-violent protests and Green Yoga, Ramdev has created awareness for the river in both the people and the political leaders.

Sacred River

“One of the things that interests me very much is the idea that the Ganges historically was viewed as inherently pure. For most Hindus, it is in fact a Goddess, Gunga,” says Sarbacker. “Instead of thinking you can put whatever you want in the Ganges and she will always be pure, the discourse has shifted more towards what are we doing towards our sacred river, to our goddess by pouring our waste into it?”

Swami Ramdev (Photo: Wikipedia)

Sarbacker has written extensively on the theory, history and practice of yoga and is looking into the relationship between spirituality and environmental philosophy. He has focused specifically on Ramdev. “I’m using ethnographical and anthropological methods to create a snapshot of the development of a particular institution and really the life of a particular teacher, at a certain moment in time.”

Sarbacker wonders if Ramdev will next champion the topic of climate change in India. With the Ganges River being fed by receding glaciers, the water system is at risk, yet little attention has been brought to this issue. Whether Ramdev’s prominence will be sufficient to tackle it is yet to be determined, however with a stardom that has been compared to Oprah’s, he is in a position to do so.

Sarbacker is a certified yoga teacher in addition to being a professor. In spring 2013, he will teach a course at Oregon State about Green Yoga with an ecological consciousness.

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Listen to a podcast with Stuart Sarbacker here.

Chris Higgins, Oregon State engineer (Photo: Frank Miller)

Growing greenery on roofs brings many benefits. Buildings stay cooler, saving energy. Roofs last longer, saving money and materials. Birds and insects find new habitat, helping ecosystems. And green roofs make urban spaces more aesthetically and spiritually pleasing, as well as reducing heat-island effects for city dwellers.

But there are some costs that need to be considered, too. “Eco-roofs carry higher gravity loads and must support more moisture for longer periods than traditional roofs,” says Oregon State structural engineer Chris Higgins. “That changes the probabilities that need to be considered during design. In order to extract all the benefits of eco-roofs, we need to ensure their structural safety. That requires research.”

Photo courtesy of City of Portland

One big question: Are green roofs safe during earthquakes? Led by Higgins, engineers in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State are undertaking the first comprehensive study of the seismic performance of eco-roofs with funding from the National Science Foundation. Using a full-scale simulated eco-roof, they will investigate drainage characteristics, load distribution of water-saturated soils, long-term service performance and the behavior of different planting materials during lateral shaking. Their findings will guide the development of standards for eco-roofs in seismic zones.

“Your TV-picture screen in 1964 may be so thin that it can be hung like a painting on the wall or mounted like a vanity mirror in a table model.” Popular Mechanics, January 1954

Popular Mechanics’ prediction took considerably more than 10 years to come true, but today’s flat-panel screens have gone well beyond that early vision. Some of them are nearly as big as a living room wall. They bring us unimaginably sharp detail, from the spots on butterfly wings to the grimace on a linebacker’s face.

This technology — whether hooked up to your cable feed, DVD player, wi-fi or computer — is also becoming integral to daily life. It increasingly provides the platforms on which we shop, share photos, read books, keep up with friends, play games, manage finances and work. In 2011, the global flat-panel screen industry shipped more than $120 billion worth of products, enough to cover nearly 16,000 football fields.

Doug Keszler, center, works with graduate students Deok-Hie Park and Shawn Decker on a pulsed electron deposition chamber on the Oregon State campus. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

However, our love of flashy high-res has a dark side. Manufacturing the semiconductors behind these electronic systems produces waste, lots of it. “The electronics and solar industries build devices where the materials input is very high relative to what ends up in the product. There’s tremendous amounts of waste and very high energy input,” says Doug Keszler, Oregon State University chemist.

Keszler and a team of scientists and engineers at Oregon State and the University of Oregon are leading a national consortium bent on greening the flat-panel display industry. In their future, windows, mirrors, walls and counters could display messages and harvest solar energy. “We’re trying to turn this industry into a truly zero-waste proposition while improving performance,” says Keszler, a principal scientist in the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry (CSMC). “We’d like to do electronics the size of a wall. The question is: How do you do that efficiently without producing even more waste?”

Startups Provide Jobs

Scientists use a spectroscopic ellipsometer to analyze atomic structure in thin films. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

The CSMC has already produced significant results: a metal-insulator-metal diode (a kind of electronic switch) that outperforms the fastest silicon-based semiconductors; water-based manufacturing techniques that reduce waste and improve productivity; high-resolution fabrication processes that forge thinner electronic components. With research roots going back more than a decade at OSU and UO, the center has spun off two startup companies, generated more than a dozen U.S. patents and developed an educational partnership to inspire more Oregon high school students to attend college. It also helps graduates to create their own careers. In cooperation with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, CSMC students join business leaders in the chemical and electronics industries to identify commercial opportunities stemming from research.

“About two-thirds of all Ph.D. graduates in the physical sciences now find their first job in a startup company,” says Keszler. “There is very little education to prepare students for that career path. We train them to recognize market value in their research, so they can work effectively with entrepreneurs and business development people.”

Two startups have already hired the center’s graduates. Amorphyx (www.amorphyx.com) is commercializing a new electronics manufacturing process that limits the production of unwanted industrial byproducts. Moreover, it trims a six-part process to two steps, offering the possibility of tripling production capacity in an existing facility.

In collaboration with another spinoff, Inpria (www.inpria.com), the center has broken a barrier in high-resolution circuitry, going below the 20-nanometer scale and enabling computer chips to accommodate more functions at higher speeds.

New materials and water-based manufacturing process may be key to reducing waste in the semiconductor industry, says Doug Keszler. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

These achievements reflect gains reported by Oregon State engineer John Wager, physicist Janet Tate, graduate student Randy Hoffman and other researchers as early as 2003. They noted that transparent thin-film transistors made of zinc oxide could lead to new kinds of liquid-crystal displays, the dominant type of flat-panel screen. In 2006, HP licensed the technology and has been developing applications in collaboration with OSU.

At UO in 2003, researchers in Darren Johnson’s chemistry lab discovered a solution-based process for making nanoclusters, leading to the possibility that new semiconductors could be made without hazardous chemicals. Jason Gatlin, the UO graduate student who discovered the process, instigated a new UO-OSU collaboration when he shared his findings at a conference sponsored by the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute.

“We’re pushing the boundaries of science and seeing things no one has ever seen before,” says Keszler. “There’s a lot of joy in the intellectual exchanges in such a diverse group.”

To attract more young scientists to their journey, CSMC students will begin working with Hermiston High School teacher Lisa Frye and her chemistry classes this fall. They will provide support, advanced instruction and resources to inspire high-school students to consider careers in science.

“What we’re after over the next 10 years,” says Keszler, “is to put the (industrial) ecosystem together that allows you to print electronics on flexible glass. They will be high performance, durable, and include applications such as solar collectors.”

We’ve come a long way from the futuristic idea of hanging TV screens like paintings on the walls of our homes.

Wheat near Pendleton, Oregon (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

It is arguably the plant that made the West. Pioneers brought wheat in practically every wagon on the Oregon Trail. It fed farm families in the Willamette Valley and miners in the John Day and California gold-rush towns. It was currency and foreign exchange.

As the nation grew, scientists developed dryland and irrigated growing techniques. They learned to control competition from weeds and to manage soils. And they bred new varieties that enabled farmers to keep up with demand. The partnership between scientists and farmers — envisioned by the creators of the land grant university system — has more than doubled yields, held diseases at bay and generated revenue for Northwest economies.

Starting with the Morrill Act of 1862, the impact has been worldwide. Here are some of the milestones for Oregon wheat.

George Harth outfit threshing wheat on Howard Pearcy Place, 1910. Garth-Scott steamer and J. I. Case separator (Ray Pearcy Collection)

1833: First receipt
Robert Ball records the first sale of wheat in the Willamette Valley.

1845: Good as gold
Wheat is used as legal tender to pay off debts in the Oregon Territory. Wheat export begins with shipments from Astoria to the East Coast via Hawaii.

1860s: River of grain
Wheat is a major commodity on Willamette River steamboats.

1861: Disaster
Heavy rains destroy flour mills along the Willamette River. Swelling grains burst warehouses.

Farmers used a team of 14 draft animals to harvest wheat. (Photo courtesy of OSU University Archives)

1862: Peoples’ universities
Abraham Lincoln signs the Morrill Act to establish land grant universities focused on the agricultural, mechanical and military arts.

1867: Best of show
Oregon flour is reported to be the highest-priced and best flour on the New York market.

1883: Connected by rail
The Union Pacific Railroad punches through the Columbia Gorge, reaching Portland and signaling the start of increased wheat production in Eastern Oregon.

1887: A statewide experiment station
Passage of the Hatch Act provides federal funds for ongoing agricultural research. Early efforts focus on a 35-acre farm near Corvallis.

1893: Sowers and reapers
Umatilla County produces 4.5 million bushels of wheat.

1901: Research network
The State Legislature appropriates $10,000 to establish the first agricultural experiment station in northeast Oregon.

1910: Better wheat
Oregon Agricultural College opens the Sherman County Agricultural Experiment Station with a focus on wheat variety selection.

1926: A league of their own
Farmers establish the Eastern Oregon Wheat Growers League in response to low prices and a catastrophic freeze in 1924. The league is the first association of wheat growers in the country.

Wilson Foote

1947: Fees by the bushel
The State Legislature authorizes formation of the Oregon Wheat Commission funded by per-bushel fees assessed to growers.

1948: Breeding champions
Oregon State University begins its wheat-breeding program under the direction of Wilson Foote.

Warren Kronstad

1961: Legendary hire
Wilson Foote moves into administration, and Warren Kronstad, Foote’s former graduate student, directs the wheat-breeding program.

1967: Foreign investment
OSU contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve wheat production in Turkey. By 1980, increased yields and production efficiencies had generated an estimated $750 million for the Turkish economy.

Wheat research plots (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

1975: Global impact
OSU’s Eastern Oregon research in dryland wheat production techniques is key to a USAID training program for agricultural scientists in developing countries. Warren Kronstad maintains relationships with about 200 programs.

1978: Top variety
OSU releases Stephens, a variety that quickly becomes one of the most successful in the Northwest. By 1980, Stephens is planted on more than 80 percent of Oregon’s soft winter wheat acreage and is the dominant variety in Washington and Idaho. It is estimated to have increased wheat revenues about $25 million per year between 1981 and 1984.

1998: Next generation
James Peterson arrives at OSU as the Kronstad Wheat Research Endowed Chair to direct the wheat-breeding program.

Jim Peterson led Oregon State's wheat breeding program for 12 years. (Photo: Bob Henderson)

2001: Bang for the buck
OSU Crop and Soil Science researchers developed a new nitrogen mineralization test to help wheat growers reduce fertilizer applications and save money.

2003: Herbicide resistant
Clearfield wheat, a variety released by OSU in cooperation with the German chemical company BASF, becomes Oregon’s most widely planted variety. It tolerates applications of an herbicide that is effective on downy brome and other persistent weeds.

2010: Revenues for research
Clearfield wheat royalties to Oregon State top $1 million, providing additional support for wheat research.

Wheat elevators at the Port of Portland, the nation's largest wheat export facility. (Photo: Tom Gentle)

2011: New leader
Robert Zemetra arrives at OSU as Kronstad Wheat Research Endowed Chair.

2011: Setting the bar
Farmers produce a record-breaking 80.5 million bushels, earning $521 million in farmgate revenues. Yield per acre (81 bushels) was double that achieved in 1977.

Sources:

Mike Flowers, Dept. of Crop and Soil Science, OSU Extension Service

Department of Crop and Soil Science, Oregon State University, Origin and Evolution 1907-1990, by Arnold P. Appleby

100 Years of Progress: The Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station, Oregon State University, 1888-1988, 1990

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Read Kernel Chemistry, a story about wheat research from genetics to baking innovations, published by Oregon’s Agricultural Progress magazine, 2009.

California coast range newts in amplexus. (Photo: http://dipperanch.blogspot.com)

Ambling along the oaky trails at Finley Wildlife Refuge last Saturday morning — one of the first days without rain in a long, long time — my two friends and I paused at the edge of a pond along Woodpecker Loop.  Just under the murky surface, several rough-skinned newts were swimming in slow motion, their bodies undulating in rhythm with the rippling of the water and the dappling of the sun.

“Hey, they have two tails!” Lorraine pointed out. We realized, all at once, that each newt was in fact two newts, one atop the other. These weren’t just newts lazing around in the sun. They were mating. When I got home, I Googled “newt mating.” The term “amplexus” is what biologists call this behavior, which involves a lot of chin rubbing and sometimes goes on for days before the male deposits his sperm to fertilize the female’s eggs. That cold Latin noun seemed like an impoverished descriptor for the dancelike fluidity of the newts’ courtship. And it offers a huge clue to why ordinary people often have a hard time relating to, or believing in, science. Tell someone you witnessed newts in “amplexus” and watch their eyes glaze over. But tell them you saw newts in “embrace” (the English translation of the Latin), and they’ll want to know more. The explanation for the behavior may be biologic. But the pathway to understanding is, for most of us, more poetic.

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge that Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmental philosopher of national reputation, has taken on at Oregon State University. Last night, Moore and her colleagues Allen Thompson (coeditor of Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change just released by MIT Press) and Carly Lettero of OSU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, hosted more than 40 scientists, graduate students, science educators and science writers on campus for conversation and nascent collaboration. Co-sponsored by OSU’s Research Office, the gathering brought together researchers and scholars to talk creatively about the subject that unites their work: climate change. Scientists of oceans, rivers, forests, mountains, plants and wildlife met scholars of philosophy, history, communications, education and human health, briefly sharing their current research endeavors with one another. Then, over beer, wine and smoked salmon, they began to talk about new ways of thinking about and working on the looming crisis threatening our planet and our survival.

Joking that he was happy to see OSU’s “climate rogue’s gallery” assembled in one place, Rick Spinrad, vice president for research, kicked off the event by saying, “No single discipline can respond effectively alone.”

Moore, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, expanded on the urgency of talking and working across disciplines, the necessity of merging the empirical and the cultural in both conversation and action. Science is only half of the persuasion equation, she said. To get the average person to believe in climate change and, more importantly, to act on that belief, it’s not enough to pile more and more data onto their plates. Rather, the data (the way the world is) must be linked to values (what we ought to do). This “normative premise” derives from what we care about most deeply. For most of us, Moore said, it’s our children. This shared cherishing of children is the bridge, she said, that can carry us over the political chasm swallowing up so much of our national conversation these days.

“We need to create a global moral consensus that it’s wrong to wreck the world,” Moore told the group. “We have to tell the stories of climate change in ways that make people cry.”

Oceanographer Alan Mix added his voice: “Scientists are admitting that we’re never going to win the argument on a scientific basis — always thinking in terms of evidence, data points and squiggly lines on graphs.”

Moore summed up the event by encouraging “creative collaboration to amplify the social impacts” of scientific discovery. “It’s not enough to just do our own work,” she told the group. “We have to make sure our work is making a difference out in the world.”

What’s needed, she seems to be saying, is a sort of scholarly amplexus: an embrace of the sciences with the humanities toward renewal and restoration of life on Earth.

For more information, contact Carly Lettero, carly.lettero@oregonstate.edu, coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

What links these four students and their diverse scientific interests is climate change. Lindsey Thurman, Sarah Frey, Sihan Li and Seth Wiggins have been granted fellowships from the Northwest Climate Science Center, a program of the U.S. Department of the Interior hosted by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) at Oregon State University.

“The purpose of the fellowships is to support promising graduate students whose research is relevant to the Climate Science Center,” says Phil Mote, OCCRI director.

Their academic talents are exceeded only by the energy with which they engage the world. Here are their stories.

Little Nooks and Crannies

Her forest-green Toyota pickup was packed to the gills when Sarah Frey climbed in and steered toward I-90, trailer in tow. The Vermonter was in a bit of a daze. A chance encounter barely a month before had launched her on an unplanned journey across the United States, destination, Oregon.

It all started in 2008 at an American Ornithologists’ Union conference in Portland, where Frey ran into OSU forest ecologist Matt Betts, an acquaintance from an earlier population-modeling workshop. After five years of tramping around the Americas and Pacific Islands doing fieldwork for conservation nonprofits — studying hawk migration in Nevada, banding owls in Michigan, investigating avian pox among forest birds in Hawaii, tracking tropical birds in Ecuador — she had recently finished her master’s thesis at the University of Vermont on Bicknell’s thrush, a rare, high-elevation species. She hadn’t yet mapped out her next move. Then Betts sprung a fellowship offer.

Sarah Frey (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“How about starting your Ph.D. next month?” he asked. A few weeks later, she was enrolled in the College of Forestry with a minor in Ecosystem Informatics.

For the next three field seasons, she monitored birds in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. From mid-May through early July, she and other researchers climbed the rugged slopes, from creek bed to mountaintop, documenting behaviors and population densities of about 50 species. “We went out to 184 sites, stood, listened, and looked for 10 minutes at each site,” she explains. “During 2011, we carried out fiberglass poles and PVC pipe to all of the points for installing temperature sensors.”

Enduring the brutal conditions of fieldwork is an occupational hazard for Frey. Ever since the iconic behavioral ecologist Bernd Heinrich (Mind of the Raven) turned her on to birds during an ornithology field trip when Frey was an undergrad, she has thrown herself into more adventures than Indiana Jones. Braving the tropical forests of Queensland, Australia, for a study-abroad program was one. Another was her Bicknell’s thrush study, which took her up and down a different Appalachian mountain every day for two breeding seasons. Her studies also have taken her to Switzerland where she recently spent two months working with a statistical modeler at the Swiss Ornithological Institute.

Frey’s OCCRI-funded research challenges certain longstanding assumptions that underpin today’s species-climate models. Typically, these models are based on “bioclimatic envelopes” — that is, the mix of temperatures, precipitation levels and other climate variables within which species thrive. She wants to know what other factors might be driving species extinctions and biodiversity in a time of shifting climate. How important is vegetation, for instance? What about competition among species? Where does predation fit in? How do microclimates help birds adapt to climate change?

One of the things she’s investigating is the role of temperature in small-scale species distributions. The buffering capacity of “microclimatic refugia” (habitat havens she characterizes as “little nooks and crannies”) in mountainous terrain could be critical as birds make adjustments to a fluctuating environment in nesting, breeding and foraging.
“I’m trying to tease apart the main drivers of where species occur,” she says. “Most scientists think climate is the primary driver at large scales, while vegetation and other species are the main drivers at small scales.”

To find out, she compared the influence of microclimate on distribution dynamics for three species with different migratory strategies: hermit warbler (a neotropical migrant), chestnut-backed chickadee (a resident) and Pacific wren (a partial migrant).

“There have been very few rigorous tests of these alternative hypotheses,” Frey notes. “Uncovering the relative importance of different drivers of species distribution — climate, land cover, competitors, predators — is critical for both ecological theory and environmental policy.”

Worldwide Weather Warriors

College student Sihan Li gazed in astonishment at the terracotta warriors, massed by the thousands on a silent, earthen battlefield near Xi’an in central China. Little did the Yunnan University undergrad know that soon she would be marshaling her own army from a computer lab in Oregon. But unlike Emperor Qin’s clay troops, built to do battle in the afterlife, Sihan Li’s flesh-and-blood legions are taking up arms against the here-and-now threat of climate change. And instead of spears and swords, her climate warriors are wielding keyboards and barometers.

Li’s army, enlisted by a global project called climateprediction.net, comprises more than 50,000 weather geeks. They have volunteered to collect information on local precipitation, temperature, humidity and other weather events and load it onto their home computers. Li’s job is to analyze the data from the western United States — one of three regions being studied worldwide with funding from the U.S. Geological Survey. To do that, she is using BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a software system for volunteer computing.

Sihan Li (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“Usually, communities feel removed from the research going on around them,” notes Li, who goes by Meredith. “But volunteers for climateprediction.net become personally involved and committed to the project.”

The experiment, characterized by Li as “unprecedented” in its scope and reach, is a perfect fit for this 23-year-old Ph.D. student in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. To the young atmospheric scientist, only the colorful richness of humanity rivals topics like wind-ocean circulation dynamics and heat-flux transfer on the list of fascinating things to study and experience. As an undergraduate, Li explored the far corners of China with a train ticket and a backpack whenever she wasn’t taking classes and working on regional climate modeling. The ancient city of Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Army, enchanted her with its palpable sense of history. “You can almost smell the culture in the air,” she says.

Like humanity, climate is infinitely complex. So far, computer models designed to predict future climate scenarios have been hobbled by one of two problems: too broad a scope that glosses over the finer details of geography, or too narrow a range that fails to capture the larger context. The army of weather volunteers will remedy these deficiencies, Li says, by collecting data broadly and finely simultaneously. The result will be “super ensembles” — suites of large-scale simulations — for the western U.S., Europe and southern Africa.

“This research,” says Li, “is not only scientifically groundbreaking, but likely to provide the greatest value to date in assisting the western region as we attempt to cope with and plan for climate change.”

Along with Oxford University, OCCRI’s partner on the project, OSU is consulting closely with stakeholders, including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the California Department of Water Resources and the Water Utility Climate Alliance.

“Science is, in the end, to be of service to people — to make the world a better place for people to live in,” says Li.

Carbon, Cattle and Costs

These days, Seth Wiggins spends long hours staring at a computer screen in his lab at OSU. But the master’s student is not a natural habitue of chairs, swivel or otherwise. In 2009 his dead-accurate aim and rocket-fast arm won him a gold medal in Ultimate Frisbee at the World Games in Taiwan. The next year he pedaled his Giant OCR2 road bike from Seattle to New York, spinning 3,000 miles in six weeks, solo. The biggest challenge, he says, was getting enough calories. “I would go to these all-you-can-eat pancake places and eat them out of business,” he reports. “My record was 23.” Pancakes, that is. With butter and syrup.

Seth Wiggins (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

Soon after his cross-country ride, Wiggins got serious about his other passion — saving the planet — and enrolled in graduate school. But instead of choosing a field like forest ecology or conservation biology, the 27-year-old from Corvallis is taking a less-usual path to planetary protection: economics.

“What I care about are environmental issues, specifically climate change,” says Wiggins, who earned his bachelor’s in econ and international studies at the University of Oregon. “But in this society, things don’t happen unless money is attached.”

Take CO2 reduction, for example. Attaching a dollar figure to greenhouse gasses is the idea behind cap and trade, which lets companies exchange carbon credits on the free market. In Oregon, where rangelands comprise about one in nine acres, grasses soak up carbon dioxide by the ton. By capturing and holding (“sequestering”) CO2 from the atmosphere, Oregon’s vast rangelands create a powerful sink for pollutants that would otherwise be warming the atmosphere. If policymakers were to offer economic incentives to ranchers, Wiggins suggests, the state could lock up significant quantities of emissions every year.

“This is an enormous land resource,” says Wiggins. “Carbon sequestration on rangelands could potentially have a huge effect.”
To test that potential in the Pacific Northwest, he is looking at ranching operations across Oregon, Washington and Idaho with at least 100 acres and cattle sales grossing $10,000. Using a statistical model designed by Professor John Antle in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Wiggins is analyzing data from the most recent Census of Agriculture to weigh various assumptions — costs, returns, profits, and so on — that underlie the sequestration concept. The study’s goal is to find the optimal price point where ranchers could be persuaded to join a sequestration program and improve their land management practices.

“Currently, much of the rangeland is overgrazed,” says Wiggins. “It’s cheaper for ranchers to add more cows than to maintain healthy grasslands.”

Attractive economic incentives would encourage ranchers to adopt eco-friendly methods, such as rotational grazing or intensive pasturing — methods that allow soils to absorb carbon in the atmosphere, according to Wiggins. The way he sees it, practices that are affordable as well as environmentally sound allow people to align their actions with their values without taking a hit in the pocketbook.

“Right now there’s a disconnect between our values and our actions,” he says. “No one wants to leave a deteriorating environment to generations going forward, but many people act as if they do. Figuring out how to get people to act in accordance with their values seems incredibly interesting to me.”

Blue Crabs to Cascades Frogs

The little girl with the sunburned nose and whorl of sun-bleached hair felt as much at home swimming and diving in Florida’s Santa Rosa Sound as did the blue crabs she loved to trap. Since those carefree days on the Gulf Coast, Lindsey Thurman has stalked wildlife both cold-blooded and warm. She has monitored sea turtle nests from Pensacola to Alligator Point as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Netted freshwater fish in Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge for the Florida Museum of Natural History. Sampled tissues from snakes and other reptiles in Ocala National Forest for the U.S. Geological Survey. Tracked carnivores in California’s Sierra Nevada range for a U.S. Forest Service study.

And she did all this before she was admitted to graduate school at OSU.

Lindsey Thurman (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“I’m a field biologist at heart,” says the Ph.D. student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, which she chose because of its No. 1 national ranking. “I’m fascinated by phylogeny — how species are arranged on the tree of life. I like the challenge, physically and mentally. I like the serenity of being out there by myself.”

These days, “being out there” means trekking through the Cascades, her backpack stuffed with topo maps and sampling kits for collecting live amphibians. In alpine ponds, creek beds and leaf litter, she seeks to discover how high-elevation frogs and salamanders are coping with climate change. With her yellow Lab, Sierra, loping merrily beside her, the 25-year-old is already blazing new trails in amphibian research. Her master’s project, carried out under the guidance of Assistant Professor Tiffany Garcia, revealed that long-toed salamanders have modified their egg-laying behavior to protect their progeny from the interplay of mounting temperatures and UV (ultraviolet) radiation, which are dangerously strong in the upper reaches. Instead of laying masses of eggs at the water’s surface, Thurman discovered, the salamanders are depositing their eggs singly under protective rocks or silt at high elevation.

For her new study, she’s pondering a wider range of variables — what she calls the “litany of threats” to the survival of mountain-dwelling amphibians.

“The impacts of environmental stressors on amphibian populations typically have been studied independently,” Thurman notes. “My study will contribute a broader analysis of climate change variables on multiple species across diverse, freshwater ecosystems.”

Scientists know that amphibians’ permeable skin and soft-shelled eggs make them hypersensitive to changes in temperature, moisture and UV rays. But there are all sorts of other questions demanding answers, Thurman says. For example, How do the animals’ “plastic” (quickly adaptable) developmental traits mitigate climate stressors? What happens to animals living in ephemeral ponds and meadows (those that dry up part of the year)? What is the impact of inter-species competition?

“I’ve always wanted to look at these variables on a landscape scale,” says Thurman. “Climate change is a global issue, and the variables are not independent. It’s hard to tease them apart.”

To find out how amphibians respond to the synergies of climate and high elevation, her ambitious study has three parts: field work, lab experiments and theoretical modeling. In the field, she will document frog and salamander populations in three watersheds at elevations above 1,000 meters from southern Oregon to southern British Columbia. In the lab, she will run climate and population scenarios (wetter, drier, hotter, more animals per tank) on the Cascades frog, the western toad, the Pacific chorus frog and the long-toed salamander. In the computer lab, she will use models to predict climate-driven changes in ecology and species distribution.

“Mountain amphibians are losing suitable breeding habitat rapidly,” Thurman says. “These species are going extinct at a disproportionate rate worldwide. With new baseline data, land managers will be able to fast-track conservation strategies for high-elevation freshwater ecosystems in time to make a difference.”

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Like a bunch of teens left unsupervised, humans have been running amuck ever since crude oil first gushed forth on a Pennsylvania farm in the 1800s. Our 200-year-long “fossil-fuel party” has made modern life possible but has fouled the environment and ignited catastrophic changes in Earth’s climate.

“We’re like juveniles throwing a big party,” says OSU’s Allen Thompson, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. “The house is a mess, the goldfish are dying, the plants haven’t been watered. We’ve screwed up everything.”
As we awaken to the sobering consequences of unfettered consumption, we can take several tacks, Thompson argues. We can give in to despair or denial. We can continue trying to mitigate damage by cutting carbon emissions. Or we can begin adapting to our radically altered world.

Thompson doesn’t suggest for a minute that we shouldn’t do everything in our power, personally and politically, to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But, as he notes in a rueful tone, international mitigation efforts have so far failed to slow the trajectory of worldwide warming. Even if nations suddenly clamp down, there’s enough carbon dioxide already wrapping the planet to alter conditions for thousands of years.

Choosing Optimism

Thompson admits to bouts of anxiety about where we’re headed. As an undergrad at The Evergreen State College, where he was part of a “very liberal, environmentally minded, progressive set of young nouveau-hippies,” he first read The End of Nature, Bill McKibben’s now-classic book on global warming. It has haunted him ever since. But rather than succumb to hopelessness, he set about constructing a philosophical framework for at least a limited form of optimism.

Our best chance for bequeathing to our children an intact planet and an ethical society — a “life worthy of human dignity” — is adaptation, Thompson has concluded. When he talks about adaptation, however, he’s not talking about girding seaside towns against storm surges or planting drought-resistant crops (although those kinds of measures certainly are needed). Rather, he’s talking about nothing less than a radical transformation of our humanity. Our current idea of adapting to climate change is too limited for a ravaged world; it’s more akin to “coping” or only reducing vulnerability, he says. Besides, the strategies we typically put forward — exporting new energy technologies, for example, or sending money to poor nations for desalination plants — while helpful, too often are also effective at preserving or extending the very economic framework and consumer culture that created the climate crisis in the first place.

So if we hope to flourish in this human-dominated geologic era (which scientists like Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen are calling the “Anthropocene”), we must reinvent ourselves, Thompson argues in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, a new book of essays from The MIT Press that he co-edited with Jeremy Bendik-Keymer of Case Western Reserve University. We must redefine what it means to be a good human, both individually and collectively.

Ecological Identity

“Adapting to new conditions really means changing yourself,” Thompson says. “The scale of change we’re facing with global warming is unprecedented in human history. It will put a tremendous strain on our social orders and our governmental patterns. It will threaten our very mode of civilization. We have to start rethinking not only our individual character traits but also our institutions so we can move toward a new global ecology. It is crucial that we think of human excellence ecologically.”

In a few short millennia, the human species has altered its mother planet irrevocably. Just as we are the only animals capable of such profound impact, so we are the only ones capable of reparation and restoration. In this fact lies our greatest duty, says Thompson.

“Humanity now has the role of managing the global biosphere,” he writes. “We were neither designed nor destined for this; only the contingent course of history has made it so. … Human beings are now managers of the planet in the sense that collectively our actions determine the basic conditions for the existence of all life on Earth.”

For Oregon BEST, Johanna Brickman brings university researchers and businesses together to develop new solutions to environmental problems. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PORTLAND, Oregon – Oysters and clams build their shells locally. Using only the most immediate minerals, chemicals and organic compounds to craft their shelters, the mulluscs are masters of waste-free, energy-efficient, life-sustaining construction.

A group of humans led in part by the Oregon University System has embarked on a similarly molluscan task: to construct a “living building” that taps directly into nature. Like a biological organism, the Oregon Sustainability Center in downtown Portland is designed to create energy from the sun, capture water from the sky and recycle outputs to the Earth. Workspaces will be alive with sensors giving continuous feedback to tenants on the fundamental questions driving the project: How are we protecting the planet? How can we do better?

“The built environment, as a form of both art and problem-solving, is a real, tangible expression of human connection to the Earth,” notes Johanna Brickman, an expert in sustainable architecture and a key participant in the endeavor. “It’s the shell that we build for ourselves.”

The center’s planned use of 100-percent local, eco-friendly materials is just the beginning. More broadly, its creators envision it as a crucible for innovation. A “triple-net-zero” building — one that emits no carbon, generates its own energy, and produces no waste — it could showcase the world’s most advanced technologies in green construction.

The center is the serendipitous brainchild of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the City of Portland, the Oregon Environmental Council and Earth Advantage Institute, all of which were heading down the same built-environment path in 2008 when they bumped into each other and decided to join forces. The university researchers, architects, engineers, urban planners, environmentalists and entrepreneurs leading the project anticipate its role as an internationally recognized seedbed for life-sustaining technologies when it opens, possibly as early as 2013. But with a price tag of $62 million, it has hit a stumbling block: strapped state and city budgets. Financial support for the project will remain uncertain, The Oregonian reported in December 2011, until the Legislature votes in February and the Portland City Council votes in the spring.

Synergies of Energy

Johanna Brickman is all about the synergies of design, construction and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. When she arrived in Portland in the late ‘90s, her resume featured degrees in studio art and environmental studies, four years of organic farming, and a stint as an artist for a Southern California architect. It all coalesced in a new position created for her at one of Portland’s leading firms, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, to “inform their design from a sustainability perspective.” She began digging into alternative materials. “Organic farming taught me a lot about systems thinking — the interconnectedness of things,” she says. “In my work, I’m always looking at the intersection of culture and natural systems — anthropology, policy, biology — and how all of that merges with self-expression.”

With LEED certification just emerging as the “industry’s catapult” toward sustainability, Brickman grew her team at ZGF to eight before taking on her current challenge: speeding up commercialization of emerging technologies and spurring technical solutions to environmental problems by bringing university researchers and private businesses together. “If you push these two groups together as much as possible and force that interaction, you’d be surprised at what pops out,” says Brickman.

Brickman manages the Sustainable Built Environment Program for Oregon BEST (Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center), a legislatively created research center that drives innovation in green building and renewable energy by connecting businesses with more than 200 researchers from Oregon State, Portland State, University of Oregon and Oregon Institute of Technology. Nearly half are from OSU. Rick Spinrad, OSU’s vice president for research, sits on BEST’s board of directors.
“Of the folks who have been involved in our research team, OSU has been disproportionately represented,” Brickman says.

“They’ve had a lot of interest and a lot of engagement. In terms of doing applied research, it’s been really rewarding to work with the OSU folks.”

Extending Resources

Scott Shull is Intel’s liaison with Oregon BEST. “We’re looking at closing the loop with the office worker, with the individuals who are in the building,” says Shull, a director in Intel’s Eco-Technology program and a member of Oregon BEST’s university-industry research consortium. “Intel, having spent 30 years making computing personal said, ‘Well, we can lead the way in making energy personal, too.’”

The “concept vehicle” Intel has developed is a PC equipped with light- and climate-sensing devices. “We call it POEM — personal office energy manager,” says Shull. “It detects ambient conditions — What’s the light? What’s the temperature? What’s the humidity? We’ll be able to integrate all this information, report it to the user and coach them if they want to do better.”

Oregon’s preeminence in life-sustaining policies, especially in transportation and land-use planning, is unquestioned, Brickman says. “We’re a state that has long relied on its natural resources for its success. Along with that comes an awareness of the need to preserve, to extend, to care for those resources — and an understanding of how that’s tied to your own sustainability.”

Villagers work together to transplant rice into the paddy in late spring. (Photo: Jenna Tilt)

The young Chinese laborer was desperate. Like millions of other migrant workers in China’s dash to industrialize, he had left his home and family to work in a factory in the rural interior. Now, environmental officials had closed the zinc smelter in Futian where he worked, and without a job, nearly out of money and separated from his support community, he knocked on the door of the inquisitive American who had been conducting interviews in the village. He asked the foreigner if he could help him with another job or a bus ticket back home. Then he broke down in tears.

“I suspected that he was just looking for money,” writes Bryan Tilt in his 2010 book, The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China. Tilt, who was a University of Washington graduate student at the time, told the man to come back later and consulted with his landlord, Li Jiejie. She had an extensive family network throughout the region, the arid foothills of southern Sichuan Province. Eventually, Jiejie helped Tilt find the man a job carrying mortar at a construction project. The pay was less than half of what he had made at the smelter.

The laborer’s problems were not unusual. Workers like him, China’s so-called “floating population,” have transformed the Chinese countryside by operating make-shift mines and factories, often living with their families in industrial compounds fouled by coal smoke, polluted water and other wastes. In the 1980s, more than 100 million people moved from agriculture to industry — the largest employment shift ever recorded.

When Tilt, now an Oregon State University anthropologist and a Fulbright scholar, first visited Futian in 2001, it was a poor isolated village of rice farmers. Most residents call themselves Shuitan zu, literally “rice paddy people.”

The local government had built an industrial compound that housed facilities for smelting zinc, washing coal and producing coke for a steel mill in Panzhihua, the region’s largest city. Flush with revenues from the factories, the town had constructed new cement buildings with storefronts and a six-story high-rise office building faced with white tiles to house municipal offices. On a small stream, it erected a dam to produce electricity.

This prosperity came at a price. Acrid coal smoke choked the industrial compound and wafted over homes and farm fields. The stream, a tributary to the Yangtze, ran black with effluents. Children played in slag heaps and other refuse from the factories.

“Piles of coal and ore-slag lay strewn about the factory compound,” writes Tilt. “When it rained, pools of black industrial sludge collected in ruts and potholes in the road and in villagers’ courtyards and gardens.”

Interviews in the Smoke

Tilt had come to Futian to talk with villagers, workers and government officials about their attitudes toward development and pollution. His goal was to reach a deeper understanding about environmental values in China and to learn how people responded to problems and sought redress for damages.

Bryan Tilt interviewed workers in this zinc smelter. It was closed in 2001. (Photo: Bryan Tilt)

For anthropologists, fieldwork means interviews, so Tilt visited people in their homes and offices, scribbling hurried notes in English and Mandarin, which he speaks fluently. (“As an anthropologist, you really can’t understand people except through their language,” he says.) He created questionnaires and asked villagers to fill them out. Enveloped in coal smoke with a handkerchief over his mouth, he interviewed workers in the factory compound.

Although he would have preferred to use a tape recorder to document his discussions, he found quickly that people were reluctant. “People don’t want to talk into tape recorders,” he says. “Recent political history has told them that doing things on the record can be dangerous.”

At times, the conversations were casual and relaxed. Residents honored their guest with refreshments before talking about more serious matters. “In China, you don’t just show up and start doing your work and start pushing your agenda. You eat and you drink. There’s an expectation that you socialize together,” Tilt says. In Futian, Tilt was often served a homemade liquor called bai-jiu, a drink that challenged his palette. “It was like gasoline, only less tasty,” he says.

Conventional wisdom about a society’s attitude toward the environment holds that in the early stages of development, nature takes a back seat to more pressing needs, such as food, warmth and shelter. And yet what Tilt found during his fieldwork was that local farmers and townspeople, most of whom lived in houses with dirt floors and made the equivalent of less than $500 a year, put a high priority on clean air and water.

It wasn’t just a matter of treating nature as sacred. Although traditional Chinese religions (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism) regard humans as intimately linked to the environment, farmers told Tilt that pollution reduced their crop yields and made the stream unusable for irrigation and livestock. Other residents complained that the coal smoke and black water made them and their children sick.

“These are people who rely on the land to make a living. If their crops fail, they’re done for. That’s a very pragmatic basis for an environmental value,” says Tilt.

Out of Compliance

In fact, it was pollution of agricultural water that broke the back of Futian’s industrial enterprises. In 2000, a group of farmers appealed to local government and to regional environmental officials to have the factories closed.

Two years later, as the pollution continued to spew from the industrial compound, the farmers took a page from environmental activists in the West and called in the media. A TV reporter used a hidden camera to record the owner of the zinc smelter saying that his factory was too profitable — to himself and to the village — to be closed. A month later, environmental officials issued a written order closing the factories for noncompliance with emissions standards.

During the dry season, farmers carry fodder home for livestock to eat. (Photo: Jenna Tilt)

“It’s often the case that wealth and privilege are a way of buffering yourself against some of those risks,” says Tilt. “These people were on the front lines. They didn’t have those buffers.” To underscore the point, he notes that he and his wife Jenna bought bottled water to drink during their visits to Futian. Most residents did not have that luxury.

“So a lot of what I found ran completely counter to that idea that you need to reach a certain level of economic development before you even care about environmental issues,” he adds. “I think the reason is that these are people who, precisely because of their low socioeconomic position, were directly experiencing the impacts of a local pollution problem.”

In fact, Futian had only recently solved what the Chinese call wenbao wenti, the “warmth and fullness problem,” says Tilt. Many older residents remembered the famine during the Cultural Revolution, when people ate grass from steep, dusty hillsides above the town alongside their livestock (a time some sardonically referred to as “the era of green shit”).

Time for the Opera

Today, they don’t go hungry. They grow more than enough food — rice, vegetables, pork, chicken, beef — to feed themselves and to supply markets downriver in Panzhihua. Satellite TV dishes have even appeared outside some of the ubiquitous mud-walled houses (“I like to watch the Beijing Opera,” one woman told Tilt). In the busy morning market, villagers shop, chat with each other and play mahjong.

Tilt’s interviews show an unexpected divide among people based on where they lived and worked. Whereas many farmers and townspeople objected to the pollution, most factory workers like the young man who had knocked on his door thought that it was harmless or, at worst, easily remedied. They constantly downplayed the health risks, says Tilt. “They had been doing this work for years with no problems. They didn’t worry about it,” he adds.

Nevertheless, a woman who worked in a local health clinic told Tilt that factory workers often came to her complaining of respiratory problems and difficulties breathing. “There is nothing really that we can do for them,” she said.

While closing the factories may have cleared the air in Futian, it also left workers without jobs and the owners deep in debt. Tilt got to know some of the workers and spent his free time with the owner of the zinc smelter, Mr. Zhang, a retired college-educated school teacher who had sunk his life savings into the enterprise. The local government had attracted him to the area with promises of rich natural resources and tax breaks. Now he felt betrayed.

Before he went to China, Tilt considered the factories to be “faceless entities plotting to destroy the environment. They weren’t like that,” he says. “They were people like you and me who were trying to do right by their families. They were trying to make a living. They were doing it under tremendous uncertainty. The political and economic climate in China can change, turn on a dime. If the Party comes out with a new policy and it affects you, you’re out of luck. So there’s a Wild West mentality where, you gotta get what you can get now and move on.”

The factory closures in Futian have been repeated across the country, evidence that environmental protection is being taken more seriously in China. Tilt expects to see continued progress as the government invests in pollution control and alternative energy technologies.

“China is kicking our butts on renewable energy technology,” he says. “It’s because the central government has decided to do that. They have a plan to spend $800 billion on wind, wave, solar and hydroelectric. They are putting a lot of energy, initiative and money behind developing these technologies. And we are sitting around going, ‘Who should take the lead on this?’ Guess what, 10 years from now, they’re going to have all the capacity, and we are not.”

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OSU anthropologists work in Oregon and around the world. Every summer, the Archaeology Field School offers opportunities to literally dig into Pacific Northwest history. See more about faculty research and educational programs in the Department of Anthropology.

Waterfall in the Oregon Cascades (Photo: Matt Betts)

If this announcement sounds like it just sprang out of the mouth of someone campaigning for climate change funding through Congress, consider that it was a statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson as he announced the approval of the Water Resources Research Act of 1964, thus officially creating a network of water resource research institutes at land grant universities across the United States. Indeed, Oregon had already established a water resources research in 1961. Through the pioneering efforts of several professors including Emery Castle, F.J. Burgess, J.T. Krygier, and C.E. Warren, the Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI) at Oregon State University was authorized by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. Whether Oregon’s WRRI is the oldest in the US is the subject of debate; Utah State University publicly claims this honor. Regardless of this claim to fame, Oregon’s center is one of the first in the nation and is this year celebrating 50 years of continuous operation from its headquarters in Strand Agricultural Hall.

Emery Castle, the first director of OSU's water research center, 1961-1969. (Photo courtesy of Todd Jarvis, OSU Institute for Water and Watersheds)

The 1964 legislation was a tribute to the vision and wisdom of Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico. Looking forward from the water use and management at that time, it was predicted that by the year 2000 there would not be enough usable water to meet the water requirements of parts of 30 states, including water-wet Oregon.

The Water Resource Research Act (WRRA) was based on the highly successful Hatch Act of 1887, which created the state agricultural experiment stations system. The Anderson bill was prescient and varied slightly from the Hatch Act in that the water centers were designed to be college-wide, or university-wide, to assure participation of all disciplines available in water research.

Statewide Support for Water Research

The Oregon Water Resources Research Institute (OWRRI) was one of the 54 water institutes located at land grant universities across the United States that received a small federal grant to provide base support for water resources research needs in each state. “Many faculty in the Oregon University System, as well as nearby privates schools, got their start through the mini-grant program administered through the Water Resources Research Act” according to IWW Interim Director Todd Jarvis. The list of grant recipients as the OWRRI matured with changes in missions, and as the federal WRRA was amended, to the Oregon Water Research Institute (OWRI), the Center for Water and Environmental Sustainability (CWest), and the Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) reads like the Who’s Who of water in Oregon and the west. For example, Law Professor Chapin Clark of the University of Oregon was provided funding nearly 40 years ago and Law Professor James Huffman from Lewis and Clark College was provided funding 30 years ago. IWW’s mission now is to facilitate research in water in Oregon through newsletters and water quality lab services. An annual seminar series has been sponsored by the OSU water center since 1964. A review of the seminar topics over the years, such as “Conflicts over the Columbia River” sponsored 20 years ago, are as relevant now as they were then.

This stream high in the Hinkle Creek watershed of the Oregon Cascades has provided scientists with data on forest harvesting and water quality. (Photo: Kelly James)

In a 1964 speech introducing the Anderson water resources research bill, Senate staffer Benton J. Strong, indicated that “… if the Anderson water resources research bill is as successful as the Hatch Act has been in agriculture, 75 years from now we will have only one remaining water problem — floods. Our cups, or reservoirs, like our grain bins, will ‘runneth over.’” According to IWW Director Jeff McDonnell, the irony regarding this statement is that according to the early results of the NSF-funded Willamette Water 2100 project, flooding may indeed create new forms of water scarcity in the summertime in the Willamette River Basin where conservative dam management operations to control for late winter and early spring floods may result in incomplete filling of reservoirs for summer water use.

The Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) continues the rich tradition of linking OSU and other researchers within the Oregon University System to water issues in Oregon. A short documentary film with interviews with all of the previous directors, save one who passed away, as well as the current Chief of External Research with the US Geological Survey who received his Ph.D. in resource economics from OSU, will be available on the Institute for Water and Watersheds website just in time for the 50^th Anniversary Water New Year Party, planned for Friday, September 30, 2011.

In 2008, I participated in one of the few scientific expeditions aimed at characterizing the abundance of plastic debris and the associated impacts of plastic on microbial communities. That expedition was part of research funded by the National Science Foundation through C-MORE, the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education.

Plastic “nurdles,” a pre-production material for manufacturing plants, are a common cargo in merchant vessels and a significant component of ocean pollution. OSU oceanographer Charles Miller recovered these plastic bits (about 3 millimeters across, less than half the size of a pencil eraser) from the North Pacific gyre in 1971. (Photo: David Reinert, COAS; photoillustration, Teresa Hall)

Standing on the bow of a research ship, floating in the heart of the alleged garbage patch, my colleagues and I looked out onto a calm, apparently pristine blue ocean. By towing a mesh net through these waters and deploying instruments capable of measuring particle size and abundance, it became clear that the sea around us actually contained few, very small pieces of plastic. If you were to line up 1,000 1-liter Nalgene™ bottles filled with ocean water from this location, one to five of them would contain a single piece of plastic roughly the size of a worn-down pencil eraser. In comparison, plankton (millions to billions of organisms per milliliter) outnumber and outweigh plastic by a considerable measure.

The amount of plastic out there isn’t inconsequential, but using the highest concentrations ever reported by scientists, the plastic debris floating in the surface waters of the North Pacific could be rounded up to produce a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size. This is not to say that the issue of plastic in the ocean should be dismissed; rather, the problem is more complex and enigmatic.

One of the longest records of ocean plastic comes from the western North Atlantic. Compiling a 22-year survey of plastic debris, researchers reported concentrations very similar to what we found in the Pacific, but there was a catch. The amount of plastic in the North Atlantic has not increased since the mid-1980s, despite a surge in plastic production over the same period. This unexpected conclusion has led to a lot of speculation: Are we doing a better job of preventing plastics from getting into the ocean? Is more plastic sinking out of the surface waters? Is plastic being more efficiently broken down? At present, we just don’t know.

New research findings may point to one part of the answer: microbes! Not only is plastic prime real estate for microbes, but they may actively degrade it. This interesting finding may partially explain the mystery of “missing plastic” in the Atlantic.

If there is a take-home message, it’s that plastic clearly does not belong in the ocean. The practical solution is to reduce the input of plastic into our oceans in the first place. There is no need to exaggerate the problem to Texas-sized proportions.

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth. It gave us golden, sandy beaches and sunlit kitchen windows. Beer mugs and home insulation. Silicon Valley in California and Silicon Forest in the Pacific Northwest. Personal computers and the Information Age.

And solar energy — in its infancy. But for this critically important energy source, which is one of the most promising of all the alternative energy forms, silicon may not be the only source.

Illustration by Gavin Potenza

“Solar energy has enormous potential, but to reach that potential with large-scale electrical generation we’re probably going to need something besides current silicon technology,” says Chih-hung Chang, professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University and director of the Oregon Process Innovation Center for Sustainable Solar Cell Manufacturing, or OPIC.

“We need huge improvements in solar cell manufacturing, to lower costs and reduce environmental impacts at the same time,” he adds. “Silicon will probably always be a significant player, but for mass commercial power production we will need additional solutions.”

Those solutions, OSU researchers say, may be with thin-film compounds that have an ability to outperform silicon by capturing more energy from photons at a lower cost, such as one called chalcopyrite that’s made from copper, indium, gallium and selenium. Or a less expensive but also promising compound made from copper, zinc, tin and sulfide.

There is one problem. Chalcopyrite doesn’t offer the crisp name recognition of Silicon Valley. So that’s bad. The wordsmiths may have to think of a catchy or colorful name.

But that aside, it could work better and usher in an era of high performing, rapidly produced, ultra-low-cost thin-film solar electronics. And it’s happening right now in Oregon.

Bay Area Partners

“We have five private companies already working with OPIC, including some Bay Area companies, and we’ve had discussions with several others,” says Greg Herman, an OSU associate professor of chemical engineering and associate director of the center. “So far this has attracted around $3 million in support, and Oregon is continuing to evolve as a focus of the solar energy industry.”

Earlier this summer, OSU researchers took an important step in that direction with a publication and patent application on a new technology that, for the first time, has created successful solar devices with inkjet printing. This rather pedestrian technology that decades ago revolutionized home and small office printing may now have unanticipated benefits for solar energy.

This novel approach reduces raw material waste by 90 percent. Instead of depositing chemical compounds on a substrate with more expensive vapor phase deposition — wasting most of the material in the process — inkjet technology creates precise patterning with a very low waste.

“Some of the materials we want to work with for the most advanced solar cells, such as indium, are relatively expensive,” Chang says. “If that’s what you’re using you can’t really afford to waste it, and the inkjet approach almost eliminates the waste.”

Power Conversion

So far, researchers have created an ink that can print chalcopyrite onto substrates with a power conversion efficiency of about 5 percent. With continued research they hope to achieve an efficiency of about 12 percent, which would make a commercially viable solar cell. In related work, Herman is continuing research with other compounds that might also be used with inkjet technology and cost even less.

Others are helping. OPIC is a collaboration of OSU, the University of Oregon, Portland State University, Oregon Institute of Technology, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, private industry and the Oregon Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center (Oregon BEST). Support is being sought from the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and Department of Defense. Collaborators are coming from Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.

In another advance reported last year, researchers used a “microreactor-assisted nanomaterial deposition” process to rapidly deposit thin films for solar cells, sidestepping more expensive processes such as sputtering and evaporation.

There may even be spinoffs that go beyond solar energy. Another application of these deposition processes is use of nanostructure films as coatings for eyeglasses, which could capture more light, reduce glare and cost less than existing coatings.

But solar energy is the primary target, and making Oregon a focus of that industry is a significant goal.

“We think with improved manufacturing processes and new materials, we can cut the materials cost of solar cells and produce these materials with low-cost, Earth-abundant materials in an environmentally sustainable way,” Herman says.

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

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

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

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

$20 Billion Market

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

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

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

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

Renewable Materials

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

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

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

It was even better.

Illustration by Marc Lehman, University Marketing

For researchers at Oregon State and Portland State, this black box is a microbial fuel cell, a renewable energy source that uses bacteria to convert biodegradable materials, like wastewater, into electricity. And the knobs in this scenario are connected to nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes. Frank Chaplen and Hong Liu of OSU’s Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering and Jun Jiao of Portland State’s Department of Physics are using nanotubes to boost the power output of microbial fuel cells.

Some evidence in the scientific literature suggests that adding nanostructures to the surface of the fuel cell’s anodes, components on which the bacteria live, could improve the power output, but the researchers didn’t know how or why. Not only that, it’s difficult to control the properties of nanostructures, like width or density. With so many variables to work with, they were struggling to solve their problem in a reasonable amount of time.

This is where Alan and Xiaoli Fern come in. Chaplen asked the couple, who teach in OSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), to create a mathematical solution. In this case, Chaplen was looking for a mathematical algorithm, a procedure expressed as a set of rules, that would inform the researchers which of the myriad variables would be best to tackle first — in other words, which way to turn the knobs.

Alan Fern is an expert in automated planning and decision theory, which uses computing power to make intelligent decisions about sequential problems. His wife, Xiaoli, specializes in active machine learning, a discipline that aids in identifying the most useful data points for solving a problem.

And so, for the first time, although they have been together since graduate school, the Ferns’ academic interests converged, and they began working on the problem together.

“Traditional research has focused mostly on design problems that have clean, analytical solutions, which require many simplifying assumptions. We come at the problem from a different angle. We start with realistic, messy problems and design algorithms that solve them with raw computing power,” Alan Fern explains.

Mathematical Challenge

They saw the fuel cell project as an opportunity to make a difference, not only for microbial fuel cell research, but for experiments that are difficult to control. For example, in the fuel cell project, instead of requiring an exact density of the nanomaterial, their algorithm could account for a range of densities.

It was just the kind of math-oriented challenge that graduate student Javad Azimi was looking for when he joined the project as a research assistant, helping to design the algorithms and writing the software.

“I really love math, and I like working with real data. So when they told me about it, I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’” Azimi says.

The team set to work on helping Chaplen and Liu find out which nanomaterials (such as gold, iron or carbon nanotubes) and what properties (such as length, width and density) would most likely produce the best power output.

“These statistical models try to capture the researcher’s uncertainty about regions they haven’t explored and take advantage of regions they have explored fairly thoroughly,” Alan Fern adds.

They also performed simulations that can be run repeatedly by a computer. The Ferns and Azimi used this type of modeling to inform decisions about the best experiment to run next and which experiments would be advantageous to run simultaneously, or as computer scientists say, in parallel. Answering such questions saved Chaplen, Liu and Jiao both money and time.

”These experiments are very time consuming, and the researchers can’t afford to run them sequentially, so they have to be in parallel, and we can help them figure out which experiments would complement each other in terms of the information they provide,” Xiaoli Fern adds.

More Electricity

Using this approach, the team was able to successfully identify nanomaterials that enhanced power production by 10 to 20 times. Their efforts were funded by a four-year grant from the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute in collaboration with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

The Ferns and Azimi have also applied their work to data from a project examining hydrogen produced by cyanobacteria, another potential renewable energy source.

In the future, they expect to continue working with the microbial fuel cell team. In fact, they have already submitted another grant proposal, which would help Jiao advance the understanding of nanostructure properties. Nanotechnology has diverse applications in many areas including medicine, electronics and green energy production.

Azimi said that after presenting their research in papers and at conferences he has discovered that it could apply to areas that they hadn’t considered, such as improving the movement of robots.

“Because we are working to solve real problems with our algorithms, I believe the impact of our work will be really high,” says Azimi, who plans to continue this work for his dissertation.

Three Sisters in the Oregon Cascades (Photo: University Marketing)

That’s what happened in early November 2006, says OSU geoscientist Anne Nolin. On virtually every Cascade peak from Mt. Rainier in Washington to Mt. Hood in Oregon, a “perfect storm” of driving rain, balmy temperatures and receding glaciers sent torrents of rock and mud tearing downhill.

“It was raining almost to the top of Mt. Hood,” recalls Nolin, an internationally known expert in mountain hydroclimatology. On her laptop, she clicks open a photo of Mount Hood with one of her graduate students standing beside a jumble of debris that had spewed out of Eliot Creek into a grove of evergreens during the storm, which dumped over 13 inches of rain on Mt. Hood in 36 hours.

“This area used to be soft forest duff,” Nolin explains, pointing to the photo. “Now it’s full five feet in boulders and logs.”

Collecting data with sophisticated technologies (satellites, lasers and computer models), as well as traditional methods (boots on the ground), Nolin is leading an investigation that will more fully describe the forces energizing alpine debris flows.

“There’s an enormous amount of sediment up there — pyroclastic debris from volcanoes, till ground up by glaciers,” she says. “Once it’s no longer held in place by the ice, it becomes unstable. Add water, and these unstable sediments are mobilized.”

The study, supported by more than $350,000 in National Science Foundation (NSF) stimulus funds, also will help foresters, park managers and mountain communities better predict events like the 2006 deluge, which washed out bridges, swept away campgrounds, closed roads and set the stage for future floods by choking river channels.

Pineapple Express

Snow is Nolin’s medium. Practically born with skis on her feet, she has plied the slopes from Killington Mountain in Vermont, near where her family has a home, to Mt. Hutt in New Zealand, where she spent three and a half months of her 2009-2010 sabbatical. The other eight months she lived (and skied) in the Vaud and Valais regions of Switzerland. (The Northern and Southern Hemispheres together gave her back-to-back winters — something only a lifelong snow lover would deem delightful.) While overseas, she gave a flurry of presentations about debris flows, as well as conferring with fellow researchers at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and the University of Zurich.

The Cascades will see more rain, less snow and changing water flows as climate shifts precipitation patterns, says Anne Nolin of OSU’s Dept. of Geosciences. In addition to analyzing debris flow risks, Nolin focusing on snowpack and water availability in the McKenzie River Basin. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

All of these scientists are seeing the same thing on their local mountaintops: a steady nibbling away of glacial edges. Satellite images of Hood and Rainier show glaciers shrinking by 14 percent between 1987 and 2005, Nolin reports. That’s a loss of nearly 1 percent ice volume per year.

It is at this ragged glacial edge, where ice is fragmented and meltwater is leaking down the ultra-steep terrain of towering peaks, that most debris flows begin. Nolin and her team are trying to pin down the triggering mechanisms. One culprit could be the so-called Pineapple Express — those notorious storms nicknamed for the warm temperatures and monsoon-like quantities of rain they bring from their origins in the tropical Pacific. They are examples of “atmospheric rivers” — airborne water plumes that shoot extraordinary amounts of vapor through the atmosphere. Nolin describes them as “laser beams of moisture,” which blast into the Northwest from time to time, including the 2006 storm that ranked as the decade’s worst.

“We’re trying to understand the character of these storms and their impact on mountain sediments,” she says. “Basically, we want to know how climate change affects rain-induced debris flows in the Northwest and other mountain regions worldwide.”

After Year One of the three-year study, Nolin and her team of colleagues and graduate students have found a clear link between debris flow events and unusually high freezing levels — the elevation where precipitation falls as snow instead of rain.

“The freezing altitudes of nearly all the storms that caused debris flows are at least one standard deviation higher than other significant rainfall events occurring in the same season,” Nolin writes along with her co-investigators Stephen Lancaster, an OSU geomorphologist, and Gordon Grant, a courtesy professor from the U.S. Forest Service, in their annual report to NSF. “Further, nearly all debris-flow events were coupled with … atmospheric river-like conditions.”

Yet because of the complex interplay of mountain systems, storm dynamics and debris-flow mechanics, Nolin says, “the conclusive story continues to elude us.”

Upslope, Downslope

“Water flows downhill, but policy flows uphill,” Nolin told members of the international Mountain Research Initiative in Perth, Scotland, last fall.

On the “upslope-downslope continuum,” it’s the big population centers in the valleys and on the coasts that pass the laws and set the agendas for timber harvest, land use, energy resources, air quality, water allocation and just about everything else that affects the highlands, she explained.

Policy isn’t the only thing that rises. Greenhouse gasses produced by cities and by fossil fuel users in the lowlands have caused temperatures to rise in the mountains. Research reveals that this warming is altering the foothills and forests of Oregon’s Cascades in measurable ways. Spring is arriving a full month sooner than it did 50 years ago in some parts of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Nolin says, citing the research of OSU atmospheric scientist Christoph Thomas. Winters’ final frosts, he found, are falling ever earlier on the calendar. Water levels in the McKenzie River are dropping. Lower elevation snowpack — accumulated layers of snowfall that build up and compact during the winter — is disappearing.

“When snow melts earlier, we lose water storage,” says Nolin. “Snowpack is a reservoir for us.”

In Oregon’s Hood River Valley, 50 to 80 percent of the water that irrigates crops comes from Mt. Hood’s glaciers and snowpack. If early melting trends continue, that priceless meltwater is in danger of dwindling by early- to mid-summer, leaving farmers in short supply during the hottest months when they need it most.

“Climate change,” Nolin says, “disproportionately affects mountain regions.” One reason is found in the physical properties of light and frozen H2O — properties she studied along with satellite remote sensing as a Ph.D. student at U.C. Santa Barbara. After having previously worked as a soil and water scientist, she became entranced by the elegant physics of light interacting with ice particles.

“Soil and snow are both particulate, porous substances,” she says. “But snow is so much more simple and clean. Radiative transfer theory is a very straightforward way to monitor snow from satellites.”

In fact, the glittering white of snow and ice is what explains the vulnerability of mountains to climate change. Whiteness, Nolin explains, reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere. As light-reflecting snowcaps and ice sheets shrink, more sunlight gets absorbed into the earth instead of bouncing off.

Melting accelerates as ever more light and heat are captured and held. Scientists call this phenomenon the “ice-albedo feedback.” As a vicious cycle, it causes temperatures to actually rise faster in ice-laden places than elsewhere on the planet.

Those ice-laden places include the North Atlantic island of Greenland, where as an early-career scientist, Nolin spent several summers studying polar climatology.

“It’s flat and white as far as you can see,” she recalls. But if that sounds like a complaint about the frozen landscape, she quickly sets the record straight. “It glitters,” she says. “It’s very pretty.”

On the Web: See more about OSU’s Mountain Hydroclimatology Research Group.

Al Shay’s Green Tower holds cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs and more. (Photo: Al Shay)

If your taste buds yearn for home-grown tomatoes, spinach, onions, garlic, lettuce, potatoes and cukes, but your garden is the size of a postage stamp, Al Shay has an idea for you.

The instructor in OSU’s Dept. of Horticulture has built a “green tower” that creates nearly 90 square feet of usable plant growing space in a 12.5 square-foot footprint. Shay constructed the tower on the OSU campus and filled it with left-over soil from research projects, well rotted dairy manure and a commercial potting mix.

The tower can accommodate 45 to 55 plants, including those planted on top. Construction materials include rebar, landscape fabric and poultry fencing. He is hoping to find funding to complete a 100′ long row — a living wall —  where he can vary the soil types and water regimes to see what is most efficient.

With Redfish Rocks in the distance, Port Orford fishermen prepare for a day at sea. (Photo: Heath Korvola)

Performing surgery on a fish is tricky enough. But when the surgeon wields his scalpel while kneeling in a boat that’s bucking like a mechanical bull, the task requires a whole new level of finesse.

One high-overcast afternoon off the shores of Port Orford, that’s exactly what Oregon State University researchers Scott Heppell and Tom Calvanese are about to do. They have motored out to a rocky reef in pursuit of five species of rockfish — blacks, canaries, Chinas, coppers, quillbacks — and a species of sculpin called a cabezon, for implantation with acoustic monitoring tags. Idling their outboard motor inside a cluster of craggy outcroppings known as Redfish Rocks, the men brace themselves in the bow of a heaving Boston Whaler named OSU Fisheries & Wildlife. Each man drops a hook and line into the ocean.

The rockfish are biting like crazy. Over and over, the researchers reel them in, only to find that they’re members of non-targeted species. “Another blue,” Heppell grouses after releasing the fourth grayish-blue specimen. Then his pole arcs hard as another fish takes his bait. He draws it to the side of the boat. “It’s a black!” he announces.

He gently unhooks the steel-gray fish whose spiny head looks like a Japanese fan unfurled. “All species of rockfish are beautiful,” he observes. “Their genus name, Sebastes, is Greek for ‘magnificent’.”

After a couple of false starts when the slippery animal writhes out of his hands and flops onto the floor of the boat, he and Calvanese invert the fish onto the “surgery cradle,” a v-shaped acetate device custom-made for this procedure. The fish lies still as Calvanese bathes its gills with fresh seawater to keep them wet and oxygenated. Working fast, Heppell makes a half-inch incision in the body wall, avoiding the liver. He sterilizes a black plastic cylinder about the size of a ballpoint-pen cap and tucks it into the tiny opening. Every few minutes, the battery-powered electronic device sends out an acoustic signal uniquely coded for that individual fish. A series of underwater microphones, which Calvanese previously deployed around the reef’s perimeter, will pick up the ultrasonic pinging from the fish’s transmitter and store the data, allowing the researchers to track its movements over the coming year.

Still unfazed by the boat’s rocking motion, Heppell takes a couple of deft stitches with a nylon thread to close the wound, applies an antibiotic, and sets the fish carefully inside a pyramid-shaped wire cage attached to a 50-foot yellow rope. He and Calvanese lower the cage, which is equipped with a miniature camera, into the depths of the reef.  They watch the fish’s behavior on a small monitor mounted on the dashboard, holding their breath. Despite the trauma of surgery, 98 percent of tagged fish survive, studies have shown.

Redfish Rocks, a temperate reef just offshore at Port Orford, is under study as one of Oregon’s two pilot marine reserves (Photo: Heath Korvola)

“OK, he’s swimming,” Heppell says a few moments later.

The researchers pull a release lever, and the cage pops open. The black rockfish — one of seven fish tagged that day — returns to the reef, where it could live for 50 years or more.

The study — which Calvanese is conducting in collaboration with local fishermen for his master’s degree in Marine Resource Management — is part of a massive multi-institution research undertaking at Redfish Rocks, one of two pilot sites that were set aside as no-fishing zones called “marine reserves” in 2008 by the Legislature on the recommendation of Oregon’s Ocean Policy Advisory Council (OPAC). Scientists like Calvanese and Heppell, an assistant professor in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, are studying the cold-water reef ecosystem for data that will form a baseline “snapshot” against which future findings can be compared.

OPAC’s overarching research question is, Can marine reserves help protect biodiversity, marine habitats and areas important to marine fisheries in Oregon’s coastal waters? If so, how big should the no-fishing zones be for optimal effectiveness? Tracking rockfish is one way to find out.

“With acoustic tracking, we can see the fish’s home-range patterns,” says Heppell. “How far does a fish move in a day? How far does it move over the course of a season? How often does it swim outside the protection of the reserve? From a management perspective, this study will let us know how often and how long the fish are vulnerable to harvest.”

These are questions that have engaged oceanographers, marine biologists and Sea Grant Extension agents at OSU for at least a decade. Despite strong scientific evidence that marine reserves, when well designed and carefully monitored, provide safe haven for fish, thus allowing dwindling populations to rebound, many Oregon fishermen perceive them as threats to their livelihood. If fishermen don’t buy in, reserves won’t work, research shows.

“The first element of marine reserve success is that people don’t fish there,” says OSU’s Selina Heppell, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who sits on OPAC’s Science and Technical Advisory Committee (and is married to Scott Heppell). “Biological response, economic benefits — those all come later. If you put lines on a map and people ignore them, your reserve is a failure.”

The fate of marine reserves in Oregon, it turns out, hinges not only on science, but also on buy-in from a host of stakeholders: commercial and recreational fishermen, environmentalists, business proprietors, local government, property owners and coastal communities. Port Orford, with its thriving reef at Redfish Rocks, has been at the forefront of getting that buy-in.

Diving for Data

One recent wind-lashed morning, Alix Laferriere finds herself ashore, stuck at a desk. “The seas are too high for sampling,” the biologist grumbles from her Newport office.

As the West Coast’s only dry dock, Port Orford launches fishing boats by crane (Photo: Heath Korvola)

As soon as the swells subside, she’ll be back aboard a boat overseeing deployment of scuba divers to install an underwater electronic device to record water temperature and light hourly for six months. All sorts of other high-tech scientific gear — high-def cameras, laser equipment, a remotely operated vehicle named Sea Cow — will be used throughout the winter as weather allows. Laferriere’s job at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) is to coordinate scientific studies testing the effectiveness of Oregon’s marine reserves. Data and technical support from OSU-based PISCO (Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans) are contributing to the pool of findings along with OSU scientists Scott and Selina Heppell and Calvanese. Marine geologist Chris Goldfinger has mapped Redfish Rocks with underwater imaging technologies. Marine ecologist Mark Hixon has provided leadership on the national, state and local levels. Oregon Sea Grant has studied the socioeconomic impacts of marine reserves as well as serving as a neutral convener for community dialog.

When half a dozen divers — on contract to the ODFW from UC Santa Cruz — flop tanks-first off the boat and disappear, one by one, into the waters at Redfish Rocks or when the agency’s $20,000 pressurized video-cam is gentled toward the seafloor on its tether, the human researchers and their sophisticated hardware sink into a silent world of kelp forests undulating in the current, of massive, algae-mottled boulders festooned with scarlet sea stars and giant, snow-white anemones, of sand-dollar beds and colonies of Crayola-colored sea pens, of big-eyed rockfish grazing on plankton with dour mouths, of sea lions churning round and round in the murk, eyeing the divers curiously.

“We’ve collected an amazing amount of information to characterize the site,” says Laferriere. “We’re collecting data on seafloor structure, on ocean conditions — temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen — and on the abundance and distribution of algal, invertebrate and fish species.”

James “Jimbo” Jennings, owner and captain of the vessel My Girl, voices mixed feelings about reserves as a member of the Redfish Rocks Community Team (Photo: Justin Smith)

As biological research leader for Oregon’s marine reserves, Laferriere gives regular updates to the Redfish Rocks community team — about 20 people from all walks of coastal life, from business and politics to charter and commercial fishing to science and conservation.

Underwater videos are a highlight of her reports. On the first Monday in October, team members who are gathered at Port Orford City Hall for their monthly meeting watch with interest as the reef comes alive on a big screen. A rock face bristling with spiny urchins sheers off steeply to depths of 65 feet. Giant, ghostly anemones cling to the submerged cliffs. Divers swim in waters as green as tea (a “mega-bloom of mysid shrimp” lends the water its “eerie” green tinge, Laferriere remarks) as they inventory resident species, from invertebrates to fish to marine mammals. They record their observations on waterproof slates.

“The whole time we were out, a gray whale was playing around,” Laferriere tells the team. “The place is obviously alive.”

But on this particular Monday night, the serene ocean imagery soon gives way to a testy tone. James “Jimbo” Jennings, one of three fishermen on the team, is feeling frustrated. Like many fishermen up and down the Oregon Coast, Jennings worries that reserves will hamstring a commercial fishing industry already tangled in a phalanx of state and federal rules restricting catches and seasons. Wave-energy parks, wind turbines and fish farms are sure to carve up and close off even more ocean real estate in coming years.

The fear starts with dollars and cents (“How hard can you squeeze a fisherman till he can’t make a living?” he demands).  But it goes deeper. The team’s grand vision for the port — to build a research field station on the dock and a marine interpretive center for tourists — threatens to alter Port Orford’s character in ways that could marginalize the fleet, says Jennings, owner and skipper of a 34-foot vessel named My Girl. He complains about the “Disneyland effect” of tourism and the ivory tower of science, contrasting those endeavors against the practical, putting-food-on-the-table impact of fishing. Port manager Gary Anderson chimes in angrily, railing against proposals that he predicts will infect the traditional fishermen’s dock with alien interests. David Smith, president of the local chamber of commerce, sympathizes with the fishermen’s concerns, but argues for the economic opportunities and diversification that tourism and research would bring to a slumping economy. Jennings fires back, offering a paean to the fisherman’s critical role in feeding the world that ends with a plea to safeguard an ancient way of life.

“I think you’re throwing out a culture,” Jennings tells the members gathered around the table.

Political Ecology of Fishing

This core conflict — the survival of ocean ecosystems versus the survival of human economies and traditions — is at the crux of Oregon’s community team process, which the Legislature laid out in House Bill 3013 passed in 2008. The act not only established pilot marine reserves at Redfish Rocks and Otter Rock but also charged ODFW with studying the potential of three additional reserves: Cape Falcon, Cascade Head and Cape Perpetua. A fourth reserve at Cape Arago-Seven Devils was pegged for preliminary discussion.

Biology was only half the mandate. The other half was sociology. ODFW was tasked with assessing the impact of marine reserves on local livelihoods as well as on ocean ecosystems. To make sure all points of view were honored, community teams had to represent all stakeholders, from commercial and recreational fishermen to conservationists to scientists and local leaders.

Port Orford dock worker Faron Busso holds a rougheye rockfish, one of many species that live in the temperate reefs off the southern Oregon Coast. (Photo: Heath Korvola)

These disparate voices are full-throated on this Monday-night meeting in Port Orford. The contentiousness catches everyone by surprise. While other coastal communities have fought bitterly against the concept of no-fishing zones, Port Orford has been the poster child of civility and open-mindedness in the state’s marine reserve debate.

OSU researcher Mark Hixon has been at the frontlines of the battle since the beginning.

“Oregon is way behind most other states in establishing marine reserves — and definitely way behind the other Pacific states of Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and California,” says Hixon, who chaired the national Marine Protected Areas Federal Advisory Committee before taking on the co-chairmanship of Oregon’s Cape Perpetua community team. “The simple reason is that there’s great resistance by the fishing community in Oregon.”

Redfish Rocks team member Dave Lacey, an organizer for the nonprofit environmental group Our Ocean, has felt the bitter resistance first-hand. A former commercial fisherman who spent a season tending gear for divers harvesting sea urchins and another catching rockfish at Port Orford and Gold Beach, Lacey saw both fisheries crash beneath him. The demand for urchins bottomed out when tottering Asian economies made the delicacy unaffordable. Then the groundfish collapse of 2000 — when the U.S. Secretary of Commerce declared the fishery a disaster because populations of rockfish, lingcod, and other bottom dwellers dipped dangerously low — “woke me up to conservation,” he says. The guys he once fished with saw his epiphany as a defection. He’s been called a “sell-out” and worse on the streets of Gold Beach where he lives. But he doesn’t think the maw between them and him is impossibly wide. “I think most fishermen want to take care of the resource,” he says. “Most of them are conservationists in some shape or form.”

That’s what OSU social scientists Flaxen Conway and Bryan Tilt found last year. They, along with Port Orford resident Leesa Cobb, surveyed residents for an Oregon Sea Grant study.

“The perceptions of people (in Port Orford) have changed,” wrote Conway and graduate student Christina Package in their 2010 report, Longform Fishing Community Profile. “In the past, people wanted to catch everything, but today they want to maintain a balance as far as catching and preserving the resource.” The researchers interviewed one fisherman who had returned a 100-year-old yelloweye rockfish to the sea so that it could go on spawning. “You just can’t kill everything you catch and catch as many as you want,” he explained.

Jennings, too, voices the sustainability mindset. “We’re really all on the same page here on this planet,” he says. Even as he vents the fishermen’s skepticism about marine reserves, he gets the scientific rationale behind them. “The positive effect that we’re looking for — that we’ve been sold on — is that you’ll get a spillover effect of more fish to catch in the future by giving up territory that we fish right now. We just want to make sure we get something back for what we’re giving up.”

To make sure Redfish Rocks yields data useful to both fishermen and scientists, Jennings has lent not only his voice but also his boat. Calvanese chartered My Girl and its captain and crew to help conduct hydrophone range testing. Other members of the Port Orford fleet have aided the research effort, as well, lending their time, their vessels (such the Leesa and Darrell Cobb’s Eagle III, which Calvanese used to deploy the hydrophones around the reef’s perimeter) and their expertise.

At the meeting’s end, Jennings apologizes to the team for letting his emotions spill all over the meeting room. Hey, no problem, they tell him. Honest dialogue is, after all, the whole point of the team process.

Carnal Instinct

On the bright blue morning following the October meeting, gulls wheel and screech above the bay. Redfish Rocks shimmers just offshore. Jennings sits on the dock and tries to explain the wariness with which fishermen and scientists often regard one another. Their different modes of understanding the ocean — academic versus experiential ways of knowing — can put them at odds. Fishermen like Jennings tend to scorn insights gleaned from labs and laptops. He complains that scientists too often fail to respect the hard-won, hands-on learning that happens during many seasons at sea.

Part of the Port Orford fleet, Eagle III has participated in scientific research with scientists from OSU (Photo: Heath Korvola)

“We’re out there on a daily basis,” says the skipper, who started fishing commercially as a 9-year-old kid supplying the aquarium trade in Hawaii.  “As a fisherman, you’re readin’ the birds, you’re readin’ the depth meter, you’re seein’ the bait fish, you’re watchin’ everything, because to be a fisherman you have to kinda revert back to that carnal instinct of bein’ a hunter. And a hunter has to gather information just like a scientist does in order to quarry his prey. He has to take everything into consideration — the whole environment, the whole ecosystem. What’s going on with the upwelling? Where’s the temperature change? Where’s the action? We’re right in the middle of where there’s whales feeding and birds taking off and sea lions workin’. We get to see the active part of nature on a daily basis.”

Fisherman Blane Steinmetz, president of the Port Orford Fishing Marketing Association, puts it this way: “When we go to work out there, the scenery is a big part of it. Our ‘traffic’ is to watch the whales and the dolphins, not some stoplight on some asphalt. We see it, we live it, we breathe it. We are more concerned about overfishing than most people are. We want to keep this a sustainable fishery — fish smarter, not harder.”

The rancor rang out loud and clear in 2008 at a series of forums moderated by marine extension agent Ginny Goblirsch of Oregon Sea Grant. OSU researcher Selina Heppell was on hand to explain the science of marine reserves. Fishermen from Astoria to Brookings vented their anger and frustration at the meetings, which were convened by OPAC to engage coastal communities in discussions about a network of marine reserves proposed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski. Words and phrases like “suspicion,” “tough sell,” “mistrust,” “fracas,” and “overwhelming opposition” peppered the news coverage of the forums. The biggest concern expressed by fishermen was a fear that scientists and conservationists involved in the marine reserve effort were harboring “hidden agendas,” according to Goblirsch. Ultimately, the “listening and learning” forums revealed an acute need for more dialog and led to the creation of community teams like the one at Port Orford.

Port Orford fisherman Scott Hill unloads the day’s bounty of sablefish – also called black cod by local fishermen (Photo: Heath Korvola)

But Port Orford was already well ahead of the curve. Fishermen and local leaders had gotten out in front of the issue several years earlier, forming a group called the Port Orford Ocean Resources Team (POORT) to study and discuss a raft of issues, including marine reserves. Leesa Cobb — who took the helm of POORT from founding director and OSU alum Laura Anderson after Anderson opened a restaurant and fish market in Newport called Local Ocean Seafoods — says the action was a way for the community to take charge of its own destiny.

“Marine reserves have been on the radar for ocean management worldwide for years,” Cobb says. “It wasn’t something we tried to avoid. We didn’t try to run from it, we didn’t try to hide from it. We said, ‘It’s out there; let’s talk about it.’”

Fisherman and team member Aaron Longton explains it this way: “We figured marine reserves were inevitable. It was either engage with and shape this thing so it works for us or have it done to us, kicking and screaming. That didn’t make any sense.”

And so this forward-leaning band of Port Orfordians nominated Redfish Rocks just off their shores as Oregon’s first pilot reserve. Says Blane Steinmetz: “We’ve given up Redfish Rocks so, hopefully, the research will be done on it. We want to help with the research. We know these grounds. We’ve fished on ‘em. We know where the fish are.” To further engage the broader community, Calvanese has launched a website called Fishtracker where people can read about his work and even adopt a fish to help raise funds to support his rockfish tagging research. His “Adopt-A-Fish” program was created in partnership with the Redfish Rocks community team.

Struggling for Consensus

As the morning sun warms Jennings’ back, he looks toward the reef whose six basaltic pinnacles (“emergent rocks” as the scientists call them) break through the cobalt surface of the sea.

“I think it’s very easy to criminalize the fisherman,” he says. “It always comes down to ‘us and them.’” He wonders why a “warm-and-fuzzy” meeting of the minds — “you know, rainbows and everybody lovin’ each other” — is so elusive.

For her part, Leesa Cobb sees more harmony, more unity of intent, among Port Orford’s fishermen and the scientists who study their ocean. “Our community has been working with scientists for years, and we learn from each project something new about our area,” she says. “Do we need to learn about our fishing region? Absolutely, if we want sustainable fisheries.”

Still, resentments continue to simmer even as the team-crafted proposals for a network of five Oregon marine reserves move forward. Approved by OPAC in December, the plans are headed for legislative action and, ultimately, implementation and enforcement. Fishermen harbor ongoing doubts that shrinking fishing grounds now will boost their catches down the road. Scientists like Hixon, on the other hand, question the true biological value of the two pilot reserves that were whittled down in size during months of negotiations — reserves that he characterizes as “dinky.”

Still, Hixon sees hope in the Cape Perpetua process he helped lead, a process that has resulted in a proposal both sides can live with. “I was heartened by the fact that the majority of the members on our community team were open-minded, respectful, learned from each other, listened to each other, struggled to find a compromise and to reach consensus,” he says. “And we did.”

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You can view the locations of marine protected areas around the globe through Google Earth and find additional information at a website managed by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, or PISCO.

You can also download an Oregon Sea Grant report on the community listening forums conducted in 2008.

See a profile of Selina Heppell’s work on ocean fisheries policy in Oregon’s Agricultural Progress magazine.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

"Fishermen are an extremely curious group. That's their nature. And they have a hell of a lot of knowledge," says Jeff Feldner (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fishing is hard enough. The weather, changing ocean conditions and the fickleness of fish make it tough to track your quarry let alone catch them. Now competition for space in the ocean — an oxymoron in an environment defined by its seemingly limitless expanse — poses new concerns along the West Coast. In the future, fishermen will jostle with wave energy parks, marine reserves and aquaculture for space to troll for shrimp, drop crab pots or cast lines for rockfish.

Jeff Feldner knows what’s at stake: individual livelihoods, coastal communities and the resources that support them. The Newport-based Oregon Sea Grant Extension educator bought his first fishing boat in 1973. A few years earlier, on the lookout for a career change (he has a chemical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota), he had come to Newport at the invitation of a salmon fisherman. After a day at sea, he was hooked. “I‘ve been fishing forever,” he says, as though life began the moment he crossed the Yaquina River Bar into the Pacific.

Feldner still fishes part-time, processes his catch in a cooperatively owned South Beach packing plant and tests consumer response to new marketing methods (see how researchers are creating the basis for a sustainable seafood industry at Pacific Fish Trax). He has always kept an eye on the bigger issues that define the industry. Tensions over gear restrictions, by-catch (the non-targeted fish that come up in nets) and closed seasons drove him to serve a nine-year stint on the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Now, he is one of 15 Sea Grant specialists and educators from Brookings to Astoria, who work with individuals and with community organizations to address coastal issues through dialog and collaborative science.

“We are the go-between between the seafood industry and fishery science or fishery management,” says Feldner. He and his Sea Grant colleagues Kaety Hildenbrand, Flaxen Conway, Jamie Doyle and others help community groups participate in decision-making processes on topics such as marine reserves and wave energy. In 2010, they helped facilitate a conference among scientists and the fishing industry on another contentious topic, off-shore aquaculture. They are addressing invasive species that upset coastal ecosystems and hazards such as eroding shorelines and tsunami risks.

“Sea Grant Extension distinguishes itself in public engagement,” says Dave Hansen, Extension program leader based in Corvallis. “The marine reserves process is a good example, where, in a pretty hot political and emotional situation, we tried to be the convener that everybody could trust, that didn’t have a secret agenda.”

In 2008, Feldner and former Sea Grant Extension agent Ginny Goblirsch coordinated a series of eight coast-wide “listening and learning” sessions on marine reserves. “When the process ended, the governor changed course,” says Feldner, “slowed down the process,  basically said it was going to take at least another two years, and put in place a process to ensure more community based input – essentially moving more toward a bottom-up process rather than a top-down one.”

Oregon’s tradition of strong community participation in resource management has drawn national attention, says Hansen, who came to Sea Grant in 2010 from Delaware. “There is a tremendous amount of community interest in decisions here. Nothing just slides through,” he adds. “People seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on.”

And new developments in science and technology will continue to fuel that interest. Tomorrow’s fishermen will have access to more accurate information about fish stocks, ocean conditions and markets, says Feldner. They’ll be able to harvest more efficiently, protect threatened species and offer consumers a high-quality local product at the same time. “There’s nothing static in fishing,” he says.

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For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Partnering with coastal communities in support of Oregon's vital seafood industry brings Professor Gil Sylvia in close contact with fishermen and other stakeholders (Photo: Don Frank)

Gilbert “Gil” Sylvia spent childhood summers riding a bus through the lake-studded military base where he lived, hauling buckets of live fish from pond to pond. He and his buddies were trying to alter the balance of species for one reason: to boost their own catches. They never guessed that by dumping sunfish, bass and catfish into the Army’s carefully managed trout ponds, they were making a mess of fisheries management. The clean-up cost thousands, he learned later.

“I’m still trying to make up for it,” laughs Sylvia, a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University.

Today, he has decades of experience in science and economics to back up his efforts. As superintendent of OSU’s Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station (COMES) — the largest such station in the United States — Sylvia oversees research and outreach in ocean resource science, management, policy and marketing. Along with 20 faculty and staff members and several dozen graduate students located at the Hatfield Marine Science Center and the Astoria Seafood Laboratory, his collaborators include the Oregon Seafood Commodity Commissions, the Community Seafood Initiative and various industry groups, as well as state and federal agencies. Key research areas include aquaculture, fisheries science, fishery management, fishery ecology, marine mammals, marine economics and marketing, marine fisheries genetics, and seafood science and engineering. According to the Oregon Invests database, COMES programs generated more than $12 million in economic impacts in 2008 and 2009 and produced an equivalent of 30 to 40 new jobs for Oregon and Pacific Northwest coastal communities.

Terra writer Lee Sherman recently sat down with Sylvia in his Newport office to get an overview of COMES and its impact on Oregon coastal economies and communities.

Terra:    What defines the marine experiment station?

Sylvia:    The station is unique because it’s highly interdisciplinary. We have many disciplines, from seafood marketing to technology to ecology to genetics, economics, aquaculture, all in the same group.  And therefore, we can really tackle things.  When we sit down with communities, we’ve got all the different perspectives. I think it’s a huge advantage.

Terra:    What’s the key to bringing the university and the fishing community together?

Sylvia:    The key is trust. They have to trust you to be honest and objective, not to have agendas.

Terra:    How do you develop that trust?

Sylvia:    We create a table for scientific discussion and ideas, get people to talk about those ideas, brainstorm them, and put a teams together that aren’t just traditional scientists — teams that include members of the community, the industry — to tackle the problem or seize the opportunity. I don’t think it’s well understood just how tough our fishery laws are, how many challenging goals have been set into law, particularly over the last decade, for managing and conserving every single stock of fish. For example, at any given time there may be 50 salmon stocks found off the Oregon coast. There are at least 60 stocks in the ground-fish fishery. So you are managing hundreds of species and stocks. Each one has to be conserved at a level equal to or above a stock level that maximizes biological yield. Without really good science, we won’t be able to do it successfully because the challenges are so difficult. You have to bring everyone to the table to figure this out.

Terra:    Did we learn things during the spotted owl wars in the ‘80s that are helping inform the current discussion about marine reserves?

Sylvia:    Clearly, the terrestrial wars — in terms of using space, creating corridors and linkages, and conserving biodiversity on the landscape — are having a great deal of influence on thinking about the design of the reserves. The linkages may not be exactly the same because you’re dealing with a three-dimensional environment in the ocean.  But the idea is that one area may be a good spawning ground, another area may be the settlement ground. You’re trying to accommodate the different life histories and connect them spatially. We’re moving through a new era of spatial management in the oceans.  Thirty years ago the fishing industry could go just about wherever they wanted to go, fish where they wanted to go. Today, if I drew you a fishing map of the ocean and showed you all the rules about spatial use, just for fishing, you’d have a hard time reading the map. Now you’ve got marine reserves, wave energy, wind energy. And so you have traditional uses clashing with new uses just like in the terrestrial landscape. In some ways it’s not that different.

Terra:  Aquaculture is another potential user of ocean space.

Sylvia:    Yes, but not at the same rate. That’s because offshore aquaculture is really quite difficult to do, particularly in our dynamic environment on the West Coast.  But we’re just about at the limits of what we can generate from ocean resources.  The world, collectively, might be able to produce another 30 percent with really smart management of fishing resources. But it’s still going to be capped by the natural productivity of the oceans. So the only way to get more seafood is from aquaculture. But how do you accommodate aquaculture, given concerns about space, disease transfer or effluent? All those things have to be considered and thought about to accommodate it in smart ways.

Terra:    Where does Oregon stand on offshore aquaculture?

Sylvia:     Oregon has been particularly sensitive about offshore aquaculture. The federal government made an effort to develop enabling legislation to support offshore aquaculture about five years ago. But I don’t think the National Marine Fisheries Service really went around and had conversations with a lot of the states.  So the states’ reactions, and Oregon’s in particular, was, “Is this going to have a negative influence on our oceans, our fishing industry?” Politics and peoples’ visceral reactions got ahead of it. The Legislature wrote a statement saying that they were very concerned about offshore aquaculture in their state waters and basically took an anti-aquaculture position.

Terra:    What was OSU’s stance?

Sylvia:    In response to that, the leadership right here at the Marine Experiment Station, Chris Langdon in particular, pulled together an offshore aquaculture conference to try to get an honest discussion going about all the views and to bring experts from around the United States to the table.  We had about a 130 people participate right here at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. It was an excellent conference. We had offshore aquaculturists, many of whom are former commercial fishermen, talking face-to-face with Oregon fishermen. My own view is, if you want to build on your fishery industry, your seafood industry, you have to consider aquaculture. But you also have to think about impacts. “Zero impacts” is a big value today. But you can’t use the ocean without some impact. The question is, what’s the standard?  Is it zero impacts or reasonable impacts? What are reasonable tradeoffs between the different uses in the ocean? How do we measure those impacts and tradeoffs?  At what point do they become damaging? I think the university has a very big job in leading those debates and bringing people to the table, having an open, honest conversation, hitting all the issues, and searching for solutions.

Terra:    As a marine economist, a lot of what you do is “bioeconomic modeling”?  What is it?

Sylvia:    The bioeconomic model merges two types of models — biological models and economic models. Biological models help us understand species or ecosystem behavior. Economic models try to replicate our economy, maybe on a micro level, maybe on a macro level, and try to figure out what happens if people behave a certain way in response to various rules, constraints and incentives. What happens to prices?  Supplies? Jobs? In fisheries, it’s both the biological species and man’s behavior interacting.  How do humans impact the resource?  If we fish hard today, what happens to the biological population tomorrow? It’s a very powerful tool for exploring how you optimally manage.  You can’t figure out fishery or aquaculture management without doing bioeconomic modeling.

Terra:    How do isotopic signatures of salmon help us manage the fishery?

Sylvia:    Jessica Miller on our faculty is a national expert in this area, looking at the ear bones of fish, which contain chemical “signatures” in the form of isotopic ratios. Those signatures, those minerals that are laid down as ratios, will tell you the animal’s age and where it’s been—its life history. How long did a salmon smolt stay in a river?  Did it leave early or late? That may be very important when you have dams releasing water. Did it go into the ocean too early?  Did it do well there? Or did it die there because it was flushed out of the system too early or too late? Where did it go in the ocean? We’re also using the ear bone to do to a project in the Columbia River, going through Indian middens to try to track the history of salmon.

Terra:    Do those isotopic signatures help with salmon management issues now?

Sylvia:    Yes, exactly. We’re trying to connect life history with salmon behavior and management of watersheds and fisheries. How can we use that knowledge in good management?

Terra:    What is the status of your pilot project tracking local fish origins with bar codes?

Sylvia:    We developed a Web tool called Pacific Fish Tracks, which we used for marketing seafood, including salmon and albacore. A consumer at New Seasons markets, which specialize in high-quality local foods, could go in and pick up a piece of fish, scan a bar code, and view a video clip telling the story of the fish product he or she was buying — the story of the fisherman who caught it, where it was caught, who processed it. We’re hoping to have some meetings this winter with New Seasons about the next stage. They’d like to brand four or five products with Pacific Fish Tracks labels. And we’ve continued to build it out. We’re talking with at least three other fisheries on the Atlantic Coast, in the Gulf, and in British Columbia.  We’re hoping to do projects not just in Oregon and on the West Coast, but around the United States, using this tool.

Terra:   The concept sounds similar to Country Natural Beef, where ranchers go into stores to show consumers where the meat comes from — trying to connect the grower to the product.

Sylvia:    Exactly. Tools like Fish Tracks help build the sustainability story. People want to know the food they’re eating is safe, high-quality, sustainable and, in many cases, local. Our concept, our vision is that the fisherman, the manager, the scientist, the retailer, the consumer are all part of the greater seafood community.  And we’re trying to connect them all through portals on the website. So while we’re using rigorous science and objective information, we’re also trying to convey information and connect people. I think it’s a good example of how you really tackle ecosystem-based approaches to science and management and involve the community. I’m hoping one day we’ll have a K-12 portal for high school teachers, too.

Terra:    Pacific whiting was your first big success as superintendent.

Sylvia:    I hadn’t been here more than a week when a fisherman came up to me and said, “Oh, you’re that new guy that was hired by the university.” We started talking, had a couple of beers. And then he goes: “You know, I’ve got to tell you something. You’re here for one reason and one reason only: whiting.” And I said, “What’s a whiting?” I spent the next 10, 12 years of my life on it. Probably half of my work was just Pacific whiting, every part of it, from quality to marketing to bioeconomic modeling. It’s now Oregon’s largest fishery, by volume. It’s used to make a variety of seafood products, including surimi — a fish product that can mimic crab legs or other seafood products. In fact, one of our faculty, Jae Park, is an international leader in surimi research and education. That is exactly the kind of project we can conduct in Oregon, with industry, state and university partners all together at the table: intelligent discussions, smart approaches and, well, here we are.

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For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.