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Chapter Five: Integrated Science and Long-Term

Programs of Research

The success of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) depended on the credibility, innovation, and

intellectual rigor of the science it funded after 1980, and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews Forest) supplied that need. Long Term Ecological Research funding helped people with career appointments at Oregon State University

(OSU) and at the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station make long-term

commitments to support, develop, and staff studies at the Andrews Forest with less

concern for how much support the university or the Forest Service might be able

to provide. This structure of funding, however, meant that most of the people hired

to support the Andrews group’s research programs after 1980 depended on fixedterm appointments. The group, as a whole, had more autonomy to design and staff

programs of research, but many people had to live with constant uncertainty about

their futures in that group. Those who succeeded in that environment quickly

learned the importance of nurturing good professional and personal relations with

other people while pursuing their own research goals.

At the Andrews Forest, the group struggled to dispel the common notion that

“very little research ... lasts past the lifetime or career of the investigator.”1

 During

the first LTER grant, they experimented with ways to encourage researchers to

cooperate with each other, to look for ways that their projects tied in with earlier

studies, and to consider how their studies might help others who might develop

studies at that site in the future. They needed to communicate across disciplinary

boundaries and from one project to another. At the Andrews Forest, people structured their science to meet goals that the group defined in a collaborative process.

The group considered new proposals in the context of previous efforts and plans

for future studies at that site. Links among various studies, however, often were

apparent only in retrospect. The advent of LTER, and the group exercise of developing proposals for renewal under that NSF program, formalized efforts to identify

long-term “threads” of research themes. After two decades of working under this

system, the group presented those threads in its fourth LTER proposal (LTER4). It

identified each thread of research as a “component” in a broader “synthesis area”

that linked scientists and ideas from various studies at the Andrews Forest.

1

 Andrews group interview 22 September 1997, 37; communication from Fred Swanson 2

January 1999.
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178

By the end of the 1990s, scientists at the Andrews Forest had identified nine

major threads of long-term continuity linking research efforts applied across the

50-year history of scientific inquiry in this place: (1) vegetation succession; (2)

hydrology, small watersheds; (3) soils; (4) disturbance, landscape; (5) wildlife;

(6) biodiversity, arthropods; (7) decomposition, carbon dynamics; (8) foreststream interactions; and (9) information management.2 These nine threads of

research share an emphasis on the characteristics of old-growth stands, but the

group’s continuing attentiveness to conditions in young, managed stands, also

pushed them more in the direction of research at the landscape scale to include

much that is not directly related to old growth.

The Andrews Forest of the late 20th century was a landscape dramatically

transformed from the “forest primeval” Silen remembered from his work there

decades earlier. Experimental clearcuts and other manipulations from the preceding

half-century left about a quarter of the Andrews in various stages of regeneration.

Young and maturing stands on this landscape offered many different opportunities

for research in related components of the ecosystem. The nine threads of research

identified in LTER4, however, illustrate the snowballing accumulation of research

and specialized skills relevant to old-growth and other issues that this group

brought to bear on the Andrews Forest. The self-conscious, group effort to retrospectively trace threads of continuity belies the organic process by which individuals became involved in specific studies and shaped their outcome. Their published

work details numerous individual studies, but it seldom conveys the personal

initiative and interpersonal skills that linked those projects into this web of interconnected, long-term science. Those human patterns are apparent in various programs

initiated since 1969 that collectively illustrate how scientists grounded their studies

in the intellectual and physical legacy of the Andrews and contributed to the emerging pattern of those nine threads.

Linkages that were invisible or only vaguely apparent to people at the time, later

became more obvious and eventually influenced the direction of long-term research

in this group.3 The nine threads identified for the 50th anniversary of the Andrews

Forest illustrate the thinking of the group at the end of the century. This study,

consequently, does not attempt to trace any one of those threads from start to

2

 Andrews group, “H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Research Timeline,” Chart

developed for the 50-Year Anniversary History of the H.J. Andrews Experimental

Forest, 1998.

3

 Conversations with Fred Swanson September 1998.
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179

finish or provide a comprehensive chronicle. Instead, it explores the style of interaction by highlighting selected studies that collectively illustrate, but do not delimit

the nature and depth of interconnectivity in this group.

The group first developed the concept of long-term research at the Andrews

Forest and then applied the lessons they learned in that landscape to studies at

other scales and in other locations. Studies of stream ecology near logged drainages on the Andrews Forest, for example, contributed to a breakaway proposal

for a “river continuum” study with regional and national components that built on

an idea originating with Robin Vannote, of the Stroud Water Research Laboratory

in Pennsylvania. Scientists who had explored theories of vegetative succession,

stream ecology, and geomorphology at the Andrews Forest during the 1970s, as

another example, led an interagency study of the effects of the Mount St. Helens

eruption in 1980 and returned to the Lookout Creek drainage with new ideas about

disturbance and biological legacies. That experience renewed their enthusiasm for

“questioning the obvious.” In a dramatic example of “questioning the obvious,” the

group proposed a 200-year log-decomposition study on and near the Andrews Forest. That “long-term” proposal for the first LTER grant also forced the group to

grapple with strategies to transfer leadership from one generation of scientists to

the next. That long-term commitment also attracted attention to the incongruity of

permanent science and temporary facilities, and the group parlayed that paradox

into a major grant to support infrastructure improvements at the headquarters site.

In the process of improving the site, the group transformed the Andrews Forest

into a place for spiritual renewal and professional networking. In this way, longterm research secured a future for the group and the experimental forest itself.

Long-Term Research and Clearcut Legacies

Scientists planning research at the Andrews Forest after 1969 had to fit their

studies to the clearcuts, roads, and other consequences of previous management

efforts on that landscape. The initial memorandum of understanding establishing

the experimental forest had specified that the new facility would supply the entire

quota of timber slated for harvest from the Blue River watershed of the Willamette

National Forest through the first 15 years of the agreement. That consideration

overwhelmed science goals during the initial phase of planning roads and laying

out timber sales. The understanding stipulated that sales would “fulfill obligations

incurred in accepting access road money for opening up the Blue River watershed.” The implications of the agreement were clear: the PNW Station Director
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agreed to develop cutting plans for the experimental forest “so that this planned rate

of cutting can be maintained in an orderly fashion.” The Willamette National Forest

planned to harvest 20 million board feet of logs per year from the Blue River drainage from 1949 to 1964, with the explicit proviso that this entire amount would

come from the experimental forest.4

The character of the place relative to the surrounding landscape changed

dramatically during the last half of the century. By the late 1960s, the initial agreement had favored management practices that produced a patchwork landscape of

clearcuts linked with a network of roads traversing the Lookout Creek drainage.

The Andrews Forest was a “gap” surrounded by a relatively intact forest of oldgrowth timber on nearby drainages. In the last three decades of the century, however, the group curtailed timber harvests on the Andrews Forest while the rate of

cutting escalated in nearby drainages, inverting the relation between the experimental forest and the surrounding national forest. The group gradually redefined the

Andrews Forest as a science-oriented reserve of regenerating second-growth

stands interspersed with relatively extensive stands of old-growth and younger,

native forest. The Lookout Creek drainage, by the end of the century, was in a

situation inversely similar to conditions at mid century. In the 1950s, the pace of

logging on the Andrews Forest had exceeded the pace of logging on nearby drainages, but by the end of the century, proportionally more unlogged, old-growth

stands survived on the Andrews Forest than on nearby drainages of the national

forest. Scientists who worked at the Andrews Forest during that later period

encountered a hybrid landscape in apparent transition, and their perceptions of

that place shaped their priorities for future research.

The early process of “roading the Andrews” and “converting” its old-growth

stands into young-forest conditions left an enormous amount of logging-related,

woody debris on the experimental forest. Extensive rot and other damage rendered

many of the old-growth logs “unmarketable” by contemporary standards.5

 Amid

the decaying woody debris and the young stands regenerating after the extensive

logging efforts of the 1950s, Silen perceived a forest in an apparent state of ecological transformation: early surveys of animal populations before logging pronounced that area a “biological desert” and Silen seldom saw game animals during

4

 “Agreement [4 June 1948] between the Regional Forester, Forest Supervisor, and

Experiment Station Director ...in the administration of the Blue River Experimental

Forest,” H.J. Andrews Memorandum of Understanding Folder, H.J. Andrews Files, File

Box F, Storage Vault, FSL, Corvallis, OR.

5

 December 1992 discussion with Roy Silen, 11-12; communication from Fred Swanson

2 January 1999.

“Roading the

Andrews” and

“converting” its

old-growth stands

into young-forest

conditions left an

enormous amount

of woody debris.
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181

his extensive field work. As logging created new openings in the old-growth

stands, however, Silen observed “heavy” increases in “all the game populations.”6

This perception of a forest in transition shaped management priorities on the

Andrews Forest and subsequent research priorities. The evident effects of logging and road-building activities during the 1950s attracted wildlife specialist Jay

Gashwiler, who studied small-animal populations before, during, and after logging,

and in relation to seed fall. He observed that chipmunks and red-backed mice

quickly moved from recently logged or burned stands into adjacent green timber,

but deer mice populations in the logged units increased.7 The research emphasis

on logged and roaded areas and effects of logging continued through the mid

1960s. Rothacher’s concern about “debris down the drainage”8

 and Fredriksen’s

analyses of erosion and sedimentation problems associated with building logging

roads,9 exemplified the focus of research in the era of intensive logging on the

experimental forest. Franklin and Dyrness began to branch out into regional vegetation classification studies by mid decade, but through the beginning of the International Biological Programme (IBP) at the close of the 1960s, logging activities

and their aftermath were dominant factors guiding individual research efforts on

the Lookout Creek drainage.10

The emphasis of research at the Andrews Forest shifted in the 1970s, during

the IBP, from studies of logging effects to studies of the attributes of old-growth

stands and associated streams. As logging activities geared up on adjacent drainages after the 1960s, the experimental forest became an apparent refuge from the

6

 December 1992 discussion with Roy Silen, 13-14.

7

 Berntsen and Rothacher, A Guide to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, 17; Jay S.

Gashwiler, “Tree Seed Abundance vs. Deer Mouse Populations in Douglas-Fir

Clearcuts.” In: Proceedings of the Society of American Foresters (Washington, DC:

Society of American Foresters, 1965), 219-222.

8

 Jack Rothacher, “How Much Debris Down the Drainage?” The Timberman. 60(1959):

75-76.

9

 R.L. Fredriksen, “Sedimentation After Logging Road Construction in a Small Western

Oregon Watershed.” In: Proceedings of the Federal inter-agency sedimentation conference

(Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Misc. Publ. 970, 1963), 56-59.

10 See, for example, C.T. Dyrness, Soil Surface Conditions Following Skyline Logging

(Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, Res. Note PNW-111, 1969) and Jerry F. Franklin,

Natural Regeneration of Douglas-Fir and Associated Species Using Modified ClearCutting Systems in the Oregon Cascades (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, Res. Pap

PNW-3, 1963).
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industrial transformation of the Willamette National Forest. Its patchwork landscape of regenerating stands intermixed with old growth attracted scientists who

hoped to include the place as one in a network of sites in the IBP. One important

constraint was the group’s perception that any proposal for long-term research had

to be “sexy enough to be salable to the National Science Foundation.” In an effort

to define a unique niche for the Andrews Forest in the IBP, they downplayed the

managed characteristics of the place and emphasized its more “pristine” features.

The group’s focus, thereafter, shifted to studies of the remaining stands of old

growth on the drainage. The effort to fit research at the Andrews into the constraints of the IBP, 11 inverted previous perceptions of the place as a site managed

for intensive logging. That process of adapting to the priorities of an external

program of research, however, also limited opportunities to secure funding for

some projects more closely linked with the earlier emphasis on the regenerating

patches. Scientists in the group struggled to reconcile wildlife studies, for example,

with the broader effort at the Andrews Forest during the Coniferous Biome project.

Waring later confessed that despite ongoing wildlife studies at the site since the

1950s, he “couldn’t really see the role” of those efforts in the IBP, which emphasized studies of “undisturbed” forests.12

The Coniferous Biome’s emphasis on undisturbed forests was an easier fit with

the group’s earlier research and data on woody debris and logging effects on the

Lookout Creek watershed. The physical characteristics of woody debris help explain why the Coniferous Biome strengthened this arena of research while wildlife studies languished. Studies of woody debris detailed “interface issues” that

involved interactions between organic and inorganic components plus forest and

stream components of the ecosystem. The IBP provided scientists in the group

with unaccustomed resources and encouraged them to apply their understanding

of woody debris in the unfamiliar terrain of “undisturbed” stands of old growth

at the Andrews Forest. Among the new resources that the IBP provided, Waring

lists as most valuable the ability to link up with people who were studying similar

processes and issues in other biomes. The IBP created interdisciplinary networks

stretching across many different sites: people at the Eastern and Tundra Biomes

contributed ideas that the Andrews group applied to their own studies of decomposition and carbon cycling in old-growth, coniferous forests.13

11 Andrews group interview 22 September 1997, 33; interview with IBP group, 20.

12 Interview with Dick Waring, 7.

13 Interview with IBP group, 20; interview with Dick Waring, 4.
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Woody Debris in Streams and the River Continuum

The IBP encouraged scientists at the Andrews Forest to look at an old forest in a

new context. Earlier studies on the Lookout Creek drainage had emphasized the

effects of logging, but the IBP shifted the emphasis to consider conditions before

logging. The IBP was a community of people and ideas that inspired researchers at

the Andrews Forest. As people in the group tried to figure out how stream ecosystems worked, their involvement with people from other IBP sites encouraged them

to study the storage and flux of carbon as a common denominator of ecosystems.

Jim Sedell and Frank Triska (another OSU postdoc) were particularly receptive to

this external pressure to explore issues relating to carbon storage and nutrient

cycling. They were also influenced by studies closer to home, including Froehlich’s

method for measuring woody debris in streams.14

The stream team was well positioned to adopt Froehlich’s methods in their research, and to expand on those ideas to explore forest-stream interactions, because

of their earlier efforts to build interdisciplinary, collaborative links beyond their own

group. Entomologist Norm Anderson’s faculty standing and his collaboration with

Jim Hall, a colleague in fisheries and wildlife at OSU, helped him build a nucleus of

people with scientific credibility in the academic community. These well-established

scientists supported and inspired their more junior colleagues, like Frank Triska,

Sedell, and Gregory, who began working with the group as graduate-student and

postdoctoral associates during the Coniferous Biome. Among their other cooperative efforts, for example, Sedell, Hall, and Triska collaborated on a 1973 publication, Stream Ecology in Relation to Land Use.15

The riparian group became more than the sum of its individual members in

1973, when it joined a multisite initiative to secure major funding from the NSF,

independent of the IBP. This “river continuum” grant, which the NSF approved 2

years later, enabled the riparian group to operate with relative autonomy while still

participating in the Coniferous Biome.16 The river-continuum concept is a hypothesis that a river network is a linked system in which ecosystem-scale processes

downstream are linked with upstream components. The concept posits an orderly

system of biotic assemblages and processes operating along a continuous and

14 Interview with riparian group, 14.

15 J.R. Sedell, J. Hall, and F.J. Triska, “Stream Ecology in Relation to Land Use” (Seattle:

University of Washington, Coniferous Forest Biome Internal Report 1138, 1973).

Interview with riparian group, 6.

16 Interview with Jim Sedell, 6-7.

The IBP shifted the

emphasis to consider conditions

before logging.
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General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

186

integrated series of resource gradients and physical adjustments downstream from

headwaters to the larger river. Sixteen years after the group’s initial river-continuum proposal to NSF, Sedell and Swanson, in an article they coauthored with

Jeffrey E. Richey of the University of Washington School of Oceanography,

described the river continuum as “One of the most provocative concepts of longitudinal variation in riverine ecosystem characteristics.” They observed, however,

that the concept had some important limitations for understanding both large and

small basins; notably, dams and other disruptions may fragment the river system

into discontinuous “patches.” Nonetheless, they concluded, the river-continuum

approach had important advantages over more traditional studies of drainage-basin

ecosystems or studies that proceed from a fisheries perspective with an emphasis

on species distributions and productivity in different habitats.17

The river-continuum initiative helped a subset of the Andrews group coalesce

into an integrated work-unit that gained a new public identity as the stream team.

Gregory recalls that near the beginning of the events leading up to the river-continuum proposal, he attended a workshop on how to measure primary production

in streams. That workshop inspired him to incorporate the concept into a graphic

design he created for T-shirts intended for distribution to riparian crews working

at Mack Creek. The design had a western theme, with a picture of a bunch of

cowboys above the words “stream team.” That T-shirt, Gregory observes, “solidified what had been bubbling for the last couple of years. We just started calling it

the Stream Team.” The T-shirt maneuver encouraged individuals to identify with

the group, and the tongue-in-cheek moniker (stream team) subsequently found its

way into the OSU staff directory and the community traditions of the Andrews

group.18

The river-continuum grant lent fiscal and programmatic weight to the public

image of the stream team. The informal campus group grew rapidly from its start

as informal gatherings of five or six people crammed into one small office early in

the 1970s. Less than two decades later, more than 50 people from 15 different

departments and 5 different colleges attended regular, Monday-morning meetings

17 J.R. Sedell, J.E. Richey, and F.J. Swanson, “The River Continuum Concept: a Basis

for the Expected Ecosystem Behavior of Very Large Rivers?” In: D.P. Dodge (ed.),

Proceedings of the International large river symposium, Canadian special publications in

fisheries and aquatic sciences 106(1989): 49-55. For an earlier discussion of the concept,

see R.L. Vannote, G.W. Minshall, K.W. Cummins, J.R. Sedell, and C.E. Cushing, “The

River Continuum Concept,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

37(1980): 130-137.

18 Interview with riparian group, 6.
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187

of the stream team. The meetings provided a forum where graduate students could

present their research plans and seek informal critiques and suggestions. Sedell

argues the concept was “pretty novel.” They encouraged people to talk about what

they thought, “take risks,” and inspire others in the group to do likewise. He concedes that informal presentations were not necessarily the ideal format for communicating concrete research proposals, but he concludes that they “really defined

what we were about, ... it was much more inclusive and interdisciplinary than

what, certainly, this university had seen.” Stream team meetings also frequently

featured visiting senior scientists, and Swanson observes that, although the ideas

they presented were not yet set in concrete as “dogma,” they were nonetheless

“real.” People were freely sharing their ideas and intellectual property while it was

still in germinative form.19

The stream team was rooted in substantive science, but its community links

beyond the Andrews Forest were a significant source of inspiration and intellectual

credibility. The conceptual basis for the river continuum grant originated in 1972,

shortly after Sedell arrived in Corvallis as a postdoctoral associate fresh from his

graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh. When the aquatic group began to

discuss their lack of a defining concept for streams in the Coniferous Biome, Sedell

drew on his connections at Oak Ridge, Pittsburgh, and Michigan State University to

bring in leading aquatics experts. He organized a workshop in 1972 that brought

together people like Charles Warren, who presented his ideas

on systems analysis, and Ken Mann, known for his work on energetics in England.

Other participants included Ken Cummins, then with Michigan State University,

Wayne Minshall, then with Idaho State University, Robin Vannote, with the

Stroud Laboratory in Pennsylvania, and their graduate students. That workshop

culminated in a decision not to follow the philosophy-rooted, systems analysis

path Warren had laid out; instead, the stream team decided to focus more on

nutrient balances. Sedell argues, however, that the workshop started a dialogue

with Minshall, Cummins, and Vannote that continued at subsequent meetings of the

Ecological Society of America. Those meetings led to a small grant proposal that

was funded in 1975, and those funds supported a meeting at the Hickory Corners

field station at Michigan State University, where participants drafted the NSF proposal that was eventually funded while Franklin was still a program manager at that

agency.20 All of these factors eventually led to the River Continuum Project.

19 Communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999; interview with Jim Sedell, 5-6.

20 Interview with Jim Sedell, 6-7.

The stream team

was rooted in substantive science,

but its community

links were a source

of inspiration and

credibility.
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188

At the time the river-continuum proposal went forward to NSF for review,

Sedell observes, “classic ecologists” tended to rate “ecosystem” proposals low

because those proposals tended to be “big and messy,” not to mention expensive.

Despite initial encouragement and support from leading scientists in aquatics research at other institutions, the stream team initially floundered in search of a

“story line” that would lend structure and focus to their efforts. Vannote’s suggestion that they build the grant around the concept of a “river continuum” broke

the logjam. He hypothesized that rivers were a continuum with major gradients of

change in energy expenditure from their headwaters to large rivers. From that point

on, Sedell argues, “It was a matter of structuring how we were going to test or

describe this concept empirically, at four different sites and in a common place.”

The proposal listed Jim Sedell as the principal investigator coordinating the effort

at the Andrews Forest through OSU, with Wayne Minshall at Idaho State coordinating work on the Salmon River, Ken Cummins at Kellogg Biological Station coordinating in the Kalamazoo River Basin, and Robin Vannote coordinating work on the

Brandywine River system in Pennsylvania. The proposal received mixed reviews,

but at Franklin’s urging, NSF approved the grant.21

Waring and Franklin were both strongly supportive of the river-continuum

grant as a partial solution to the impending budget crunch for studies at the

Andrews at the end of the IBP. The grant provided support for a core group of

scientists from the coniferous biome to continue building on an existing body of

work. It also led the group in new directions and offered opportunities for another

generation of leaders to emerge at the Andrews Forest. That, according to Sedell,

was “the whole point ... you define a core, and then your grants that you get are

just spokes off of that core. ... for the most part, we tried to build on what we’d

already done [at the Andrews Forest].” Gregory was just finishing his doctoral

research when the river-continuum grant came through, and his work helped the

initial effort to get the project up and running.22

The stream team inspired a wide array of research at the Andrews Forest

that followed the strategy of defining a core concept and then branching out into

related studies funded with individual grants. Scientists who coalesced around the

stream team weathered the transition from IBP to EER and then LTER funding with

21 Interview with Stan Gregory, 6; interview with Jim Sedell, 6-7. Robin Vannote et. al.,

“The River Continuum Concept” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

37(1980): 130-137.

22 Interview with Stan Gregory, 6; interview with Jim Sedell, 6-7.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

189

minimal disruption. Sedell and Gregory tried to direct funds budgeted for “overhead” in the river-continuum grant at the Andrews Forest into either new equipment or new pilot studies. In that way, they funded Alsie Campbell’s studies of

riparian vegetation that initiated a whole new thread of research. The river continuum also eased the transition from IBP to EER funding in the form of a grant

supporting Chuck Hawkins, Gregory, and Triska in their studies of intake, succession, and decomposition. Those studies were later funded as components of the

EER proposal.23

The success of the river-continuum proposal had ripple effects that spread

well beyond the Andrews Forest or even the Willamette basin. The ripples included

both people and ideas in a self-reinforcing cycle of collaborative research. The

concept of a continuum began with the group’s and Vannotes’ studies of small

streams, and then people applied it to studies of carbon flow and standing crops of

carbon in other aquatic systems. “Suddenly,” Sedell observes, oceanographers like

Cliff Dahm began to look at dissolved organic carbon in small woodland streams,

as well as in the larger Columbia River basin. Involvement with the river continuum

effort linked Gregory and other new members of the Andrews group with an array

of well-connected people at an early point in their careers. The grant brought in

Bob Naiman as a postdoctoral associate and Dale McCullough and Chuck Hawkins

as graduate student research assistants. Naiman worked at the Andrews Forest for

several years before transferring to Woods Hole, and he eventually secured an appointment at the University of Washington. Hawkins and McCullough both finished

their degrees at OSU before moving on to career positions at Utah State (Hawkins),

and at the Columbia River Intertribal Council (McCullough). The four of them,

Gregory observes, “grew up [professionally] together.” Gregory, himself, took

a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1977 for nearly 4 years, before

rejoining the group as a postdoctoral associate working for Cummins, who replaced Sedell at OSU. Sedell, himself, accepted an appointment with Weyerhaeuser.

Cummins brought his colleagues, Milt and Amelia Ward, into the Andrews group,

and they subsequently worked with Nick Auman, who was finishing his Ph.D. in

23 Interview with Jim Sedell, 6-7.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

190

microbiology at OSU. Then, when Mount St. Helens blew, Sedell rejoined the

group, and the stream team began to get more involved with the land-water and

forest-stream interactions in a riparian setting.24

Legacies of the Andrews Forest and the Mount St. Helens

Catharsis

The stream team’s image and accomplishments buttressed the tradition of longterm continuity at the Andrews Forest and linked it with people committed to

riparian issues.25 They blurred the boundaries between basic science, applied research, and forest management, notably in the case of woody debris in streams.

Their success with riparian issues also carried over into studies with a more terrestrial focus. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens reinforced the Andrews

group’s focus on interdisciplinary work when they responded to that event with an

intense, interdisciplinary field project. That effort was a high-profile variation on the

“pulses” that Franklin staged as team-building exercises in other venues, including

expeditions as early as 1973 at the Steamboat Mountain Research Natural Area and

the group’s work on the Hoh River of the Olympic Peninsula in 1978. The group,

he observes, began to “take ourselves out of an Andrews context and put ourselves

in little mini-crucibles, both for team building and for science, and when [Mount]

St. Helens came along, you know, it was an extraordinary opportunity.” At Mount

St. Helens, he notes, the group staged “two immense pulses,” each for 2-week

periods. One of the pulses involved 150 people. Franklin admits to not knowing

“where this was going to go,” but he emphasizes that it was useful to be up there

in an “interdisciplinary context.” Most of what they learned, he concludes, “had to

do with disturbances and how disturbances work.”26

Three veterans of the Andrews group—Jerry Franklin, Jim Sedell, and Fred

Swanson—effectively became research coordinators for an ad-hoc, interagency

research effort at Mount St. Helens soon after the eruption. They secured about

$50,000 from NSF plus additional Forest Service funds for each of 2 years to

cover expenses for pulses on the mountain, including everything from food and

lodging to helicopters. “Mostly,” Swanson observes, “we facilitated interactions

24 Interview with Stan Gregory, 6; interview with Jim Sedell, 7.

25 Interview with riparian group, 11.

26 Interview with Jerry Franklin, 25-26.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

191

and communication so the science, overall, could be better.” Swanson and Franklin

recruited Sedell into the collaborative effort at Mount St. Helens, and he emphasizes

that the personal connection he had forged with Swanson over the previous decade

was the central reason for his decision to work with the group.27

The Mount St. Helens event was an opportunity to extrapolate themes originating with the Coniferous Biome and test them against field conditions in the broader

landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Among other benefits of their experience at

Mount St. Helens, people in the group gained an appreciation for the power of conceptual modeling, as opposed to the advantages of models on a strictly mathematical basis. McKee explains they learned to appreciate the eventual interaction of

terrestrial and aquatic systems and the potential for incorporating feedback loops

into that conceptual model. He also suggests that the group’s response to the

eruption was an important test of their leadership and organizational structure. The

stream team, McKee argues, “stayed together so much because of the Mount St.

Helens [eruption]. ...” That group was able to get together the money needed to

27 Communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999; interview with Jim Sedell, 11-12.

Interview with Robert Tarrant by Max Geier on 24 July 1997 at 1:00 pm in his Corvallis

home as transcribed by Keesje Hoekstra, 13.

Figure 36—Fred Swanson (left) takes initial readings from a set of erosion pins established in August 1980 at a study site on Mount St. Helens, shortly after the eruption

earlier that year.

Al Levno
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field a research effort on that site, without sacrificing resources needed to continue

support for ongoing studies back at the Andrews. The Mount St. Helens effort was

also the first time Swanson really emerged as a major leader of the Andrews group.

He worked closely with Franklin to orchestrate the focus of the program, and

Franklin concedes Swanson may have had a clearer grasp of where that work was

headed.28

Swanson suggests that the work at Mount St. Helens “drove itself in terms of

issues to study” but he notes that it also addressed questions that concerned land

managers, including the effects of salvage logging and agency efforts to develop

interpretive programs at the volcanic site. Franklin recalls that he, Swanson, and

Sedell were well-positioned to lead the Mount St. Helens effort because by the early

1980s, land managers who previously focused on salvage operations designed to

remove decayed timber began to pay more attention to ecological issues. He notes

there were “extraordinary opportunities” to position themselves in an institution

[meaning the National Forest System] that would have “a lot of control over the

situation, and at the same time, also remain connected to the National Science

Foundation.” The three of them, Franklin concludes, essentially became coordinators, or “gatekeepers in the field for, in my case, terrestrial ecology, [in] Fred’s

case, geomorph[ology], [in] Jim’s case, aquatic research.”29 Swanson found the

connections he had developed while working for the U.S. Geological Survey very

useful as he worked with Franklin and Sedell to coordinate the Mount St. Helens

effort. One of those contacts was Dick Janda, of the U.S. Geological Survey, who

previously served on the Andrews Forest advisory committee and had led a forest

geomorphology project at Redwood Creek and Redwood National Park. Janda,

who was used to working in high-profile arenas, worked in the spotlight of the

national news media at Mount St. Helens, where he led a component of the Geological Survey work.30

Many of the research issues unearthed in the Mount St. Helens eruption were

obvious extensions of concerns that the stream team had addressed earlier at the

Andrews Forest. Sedell recalls thinking at the time that it was “the chance of a

lifetime” to take what they had learned on the Andrews Forest and say “Well here’s

the most colossal event we’ve seen in our careers. What’s the recovery, what are

28 Interview with riparian group, 9.

29 Interview with Jerry Franklin, 25-26.

30 Communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999.

The Mount St.

Helens effort

was the first time

Swanson really

emerged as a major

leader of the

Andrews group.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

193

some of the processes we’d look for?” It was also an opportunity to strengthen

the interdisciplinary team of cooperating scientists and demonstrate their flexibility

as a science group capable of doing significant research under public scrutiny and

time constraints at field locations beyond the Andrews. Sedell recruited Cliff Dahm,

who brought along other oceanographers, along with Milt and Amy Ward, Gary

Lamberti, and Al Steinman. Eventually, he observes, “a whole bunch of the

Andrews group also did work up ... on the mountain.”31

The Andrews group gained insight into issues of disturbances and biological

legacies from their work at Mount St. Helens, and they learned about many different types and combinations of disturbances. That work, Franklin observes, led

initially to the group’s concept of ecological “survivors,” and eventually to the

concept that he termed “biological legacies.” Their joint experience at Mount St.

Helens, he notes, “illuminated the whole issue of disturbances and biological

legacies and how nature stores systems [through] a disturbance.” One advantage

of the research at Mount St. Helens, Franklin concludes, was that the group was

able to simultaneously examine “a dozen different natural kinds of disturbances or

combinations of disturbances that turned up there.” Swanson also recalls, “At first

glance, the place looked devastated—it looked like everything had been killed. This

heightened the surprise at finding so many survivors of such varied types.”32 It was

a place that piqued their curiosity and that, more than anything, drove them to work

there.

Long-Term Modeling Concerns and Terrestrial and

Aquatic Legacies of Mount St. Helens

Mount St. Helens drew members of the Andrews group away from the experimental forest and into a venue that placed them in the limelight of national attention.

Their willingness to test ideas originating at the Andrews Forest in that venue

was a high-stakes gamble. Much of what they learned demonstrated that previous

models of ecosystems did not explain the complex patterns of recovery apparent in

31 Interview with Jim Sedell, 11.

32 Interview with Jerry Franklin, 26; communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999;

Jerry F. Franklin, James A. MacMahon, Frederick J. Swanson, and James R. Sedell,

“Ecosystem Responses to the Eruption of Mount St. Helens,” National Geographic

Research: A Scientific Journal (Spring 1985): 198-216. See also, Jerry F. Franklin and

Charles B. Halpern, “Influence of Biological Legacies on Succession.” In: Dennis E.

Ferguson, et al., Proceedings—Land Classifications Based on Vegetation: Applications for

Resource Management, 17-19 November 1987, Moscow, ID (Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station, 1989), 54-55.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

194

the blast zone. Scientists involved in research at Mount St. Helens later observed,

“Essentially no posteruption environment outside the crater was completely free of

pre-eruption biological influences, although there were substantial differences in the

amounts of living and dead organic material that persisted.” These legacy elements,

they argued, were critical determinants of posteruption successional patterns. The

landscape at Mount St. Helens may have appeared simple, but “complex interactions developed immediately,” thus demonstrating the maxim that “ecosystems are

characterized by numerous and elaborate linkages among plants, animals, and

physical processes.” The very diversity of recovery patterns at Mount St. Helens,

they concluded, “makes apparent the inadequacies of simple models in characterizing or explaining successional patterns.”33 That insight, in itself, challenged many

assumptions guiding previous efforts to design long-term studies at the Andrews

Forest.

The results of the Mount St. Helens effort forced a reassessment of long-term

thinking at the Andrews Forest, but scientists like Swanson characterize the consequent need to readjust the group’s theories and models as “fun and compelling.”

Much early work at the Andrews Forest had focused on recovery and regeneration issues related to disturbance from fires, floods, timber harvests, and landslides.

Many of the people who led that earlier work were also directly involved as leaders

in the effort at Mount St. Helens. They tested hard-won lessons from the Andrews

Forest, added new insights from the blast zone, and brought them home to the

Lookout Creek drainage. In this way, the group used challenging new insights to

improve their initial theories, rather than viewing such challenges as threats to their

initial theories. The concept that many particulars of research at the experimental

forest were specific to that site, or at least not directly transferable to Mount St.

Helens, actually raised exciting possibilities for scientists steeped in the adaptive

culture of the Andrews group. They were eager to test those new ideas against

ongoing programs of research at the Andrews. This dynamic generated a sense of

method prevailing over theory, or as Swanson explains, a sense of “natural history

in real time.” The group began to design studies that actually accommodated and

encouraged cooperative, collaborative, and adaptive effort, and they placed less

emphasis on building detailed, theoretical models or computer simulations. Gregory

clarifies, “The stream team hasn’t been anti-modeling. We just use it where it

33 Jerry F. Franklin, James A. MacMahon, Frederick J. Swanson, and James R. Sedell,

“Ecosystem Responses to the Eruption of Mount St. Helens,” National Geographic

Research: A Scientific Journal (Spring 1985): 200-214.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

195

works and don’t feel the need to model everything that we do. ... we have had

small bits and pieces of other models ... it’s adapting the research to the situation

as opposed to having one trick that we try to apply to in all situations.”34

Their experience at Mount St. Helens and with the river continuum helped

the group realize they could link terrestrial and aquatic research with conceptual,

rather than quantitative models. They perceived a “strong influence” of aquatic

interactions with the terrestrial landscape, and, as a result, they expected that

terrestrial ecosystems would change along with the continuum from smaller to

larger streams. That concept, Gregory concedes, “would get so complex if you

tried to quantify it, it would crash.” The key, he argues, is flexibility. Overreliance

or adherence to a particular conceptual model, in other words, could become such

a drag on creativity that it might lead scientists into a political conundrum: “If you

produce either a controversial concept or model, then you are at the stage that it

will be attacked and criticized and then, even if you don’t want to defend it, you

usually get dragged into defending it and large portions of your time are spent

defending something that was in the past.”35

One strategy for avoiding the paralyzing distraction that Gregory associates

with defending outdated conceptual models was to initiate studies on a larger scale

that continued over a longer span of time. The river-continuum initiative was a

compelling example of the potential benefits of moving in that direction. It tested

the contribution of forests to small streams and explored whether a succession

exists from leaf-dominated organisms and processing in small, forest-dominated

streams to more algae-dominated organisms in large rivers. That concept, Gregory

argues, was “amazingly successful.” “As long as water is going to run downhill,”

he argues, “you’re going to come back to some sort of continuum and succession

or gradation of different energy processing.” Once the group linked gradations of

scale in streams with the degree to which forest-stream interactions affected the

terrestrial and aquatic components of that system, they also began to look more

closely at different scales of woody debris and its respective role. The group

tended to discount the importance of logs until they worked out a carbon budget

and discovered large wood was “dominant” in that budget. The energetic driver, as

Sedell observed, was the leaves, but they were a “minor” part of the total “organic

34 Communication from Swanson 2 January 1999; interview with riparian group, 10.

35 Interview with riparian group, 10.

Their experience at

Mount St. Helens

and with the river

continuum helped

the group link terrestrial and aquatic

research with conceptual models.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

197

story.” Even a very small fraction of wood processing, they concluded, was a

“huge contribution” to an energy budget on a stream, and that insight led to the

group’s ongoing studies of the structural roles of wood in streams.36

Long-term studies of log decomposition simply extended the earlier effort to

study woody debris in streams onto the forest floor. Legacies from past studies

and insights from contemporary research converged at the Andrews Forest during

the mid 1980s in ways that made that conceptual leap seem obvious. As the Mount

St. Helens effort wound down at mid decade, scientists who participated in that

program returned to the Andrews with renewed enthusiasm for questioning the

obvious. The group embraced the concept of flexible, conceptual models, while

continuing their commitment to uphold the legacy of long-term monitoring on the

Andrews Forest. These scientific insights from the river-continuum effort and

Mount St. Helens coincided with programmatic shifts at NSF and policy adjustments in the National Forest System. The log decomposition study they initiated in

1985 merged elements from all of these factors into a key proposal for the newly

established LTER program at NSF. That LTER proposal exemplified McKee’s view

that long-term research, as with any study proposal, should be fundamentally

rooted in “coming up with the story line that will be funded.” The proposal explained the group’s ideas as a framework that could not only tie the various components of the group together, but could also be tested with scientific rigor.37

The group’s concept of long-term research grew out of the Forest Service

tradition of managing water and tree resources for long-term use, but the ecosystem perspective of the IBP transformed the concept. The group looked for ways

to include components that would excite the group and NSF reviewers, and the

concept of a 200-year study of log decomposition seemed to fit the bill. As Franklin

observes, it was long term, experimental, and “real.” The long-term approach also

had the added benefit of encouraging land managers to pay closer attention to their

scientist counterparts when drafting policies governing forest management practices. Managers who participated in “show-me” tours of the log-decomposition

study were impressed with the commitment and rigor of the scientists who designed the experiment, and, Swanson argues, that further encouraged them to

integrate research ideas into their management plans.38

36 Interview with Jim Sedell, 12-13.

37 Interview with riparian group, 13-14.

38 Andrews group interview 22 September 1997, 22.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

198

The log-decomposition study extended the concept of long-term research

across a chronological scale of unprecedented proportions, and the ability to secure

funding and initiate the project was as much an institutional breakthrough as it

was a conceptual innovation. Dyrness notes of the 200-year duration of the study,

beginning in 1985, “This is a real departure. We were always schooled, ... when I

started out in research for the PNW Station, that our studies should be short in

duration. That you should be able to finish it up in a year and have a publication

and then go on to bigger and better things.” Dyrness himself had challenged those

expectations with his early work laying out long-term study plots on vegetation

succession in the Andrews, where he had established permanent plots before logging and then continuously monitored those plots after logging. In his experience,

he observes, Forest Service administrators at the time usually “didn’t believe in

long-term studies.”39

39 Communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999; Andrews History Project

Workshop of 7 August 1996, 15.

Figure 37—Jerry Franklin, Fred Swanson, and Jim Sedell took leading roles in an interagency

research effort at Mount St. Helens shortly after the 1980 eruption, and Franklin notes that

experience vaulted Swanson into a more prominent leadership role in the Andrews group.

Here, Swanson and Franklin discuss the situation at a field site on the H.J. Andrews

Experimental Forest during a “show-me” tour in 1997.

Martha Brookes
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

199

Log Decomposition and the Convergence of Individual and

Community Experience

The task of first designing the log-decomposition study as an archetype for longterm research, and then implementing it, fell to a person whose involvement with

the group was recent and tenuous. Mark Harmon’s involvement at the Andrews

Forest paralleled the Mount St. Helens eruption and subsequent research. After

beginning with the group as a graduate student in 1980, he took the lead for the

log-decomposition work in 1984 and vaulted from a relatively inconspicuous role

to the forefront of a controversial, yet defining study. He first compiled a “story

line” for the initial grant proposal, beginning with extensive review of pertinent

literature. This demanding effort required an intensive investment of time and

energy. At the time he began the work, Harmon was still working on his doctoral

research at OSU under the direction of Jerry Franklin. His first involvement with

the Andrews group followed the Hoh River Pulse, which focused on the “nurselog” concept. Participants in that pulse explored the notion that old-growth logs

provided nutrients and other benefits to the ecosystem as they decomposed on

the forest floor. Harmon’s fieldwork mostly focused on the Hoh River drainage,

and he had very little experience with the Andrews Forest before December 1980.40

Short-term, soft-money appointments, first as a graduate assistant, and continuing as a postdoctoral associate, funded Harmon’s work on the log-decomposition study. He initially placed his graduate studies on hold to design and implement

the project for the group, but he eventually completed his Ph.D. in 1985. In many

ways, Harmon’s work set the tone for subsequent research at the Andrews Forest

through the late 1990s. It was long term in nature, collaborative in style, and responsive to management concerns of the National Forest System. It was driven

by the intense personal effort and scientific commitment of a unique personality,

as reflected in his teenage years when he competed in high school athletics as an

accomplished wrestler. It was also a flashy way to highlight basic science and

other research at the Andrews Forest while still addressing the pragmatic concerns

of forest managers. Harmon engaged about a dozen people to work with him on

the literature review, and he produced a 170-page monograph detailing that review.

Even before it was in print, he distributed early drafts to land managers at the

Willamette National Forest. The concept moved from initial theory to management

40 Interview with Mark Harmon by Max Geier on 1 October 1997 in his office at Oregon

State University, as transcribed by Linda Hahn, 6, 9, and 13.

Harmon’s work was

long term in nature,

collaborative in

style, and responsive to management

concerns.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

200

practice even before Harmon implemented the field study. His initial literature

review synthesized previous, relevant research and convinced both District Ranger

Steve Eubanks and Forest Supervisor Mike Kerrick that management policy on the

Willamette National Forest was flawed. In response, they ordered an immediate halt

to the “piling of unmerchantable material” (PUMing) on the Willamette National

Forest, resulting in an estimated savings of $18 million a year. The other national

forests on the west side of the Cascades soon followed suit.41

The process of compiling the literature review and initiating the decomposition

study began a generational transition of leadership that was apparent to the young

graduate student assigned to the task. Harmon perceived that those who worked

at the Andrews Forest in earlier years, notably including Franklin, Cromack, and

Phil Sollins, considered the literature review a culmination of their efforts on that

particular study. From Harmon’s perspective, however, it was “the beginning.”

In that sense, the previous generation of scientists passed “the baton” of leadership

to Harmon, who viewed the assignment as a personal and professional opportunity

41 Andrews History Project Workshop of 7 August 1996, 16; interview with Mike

Kerrick, 25.

Figure 38—Mark Harmon explains the Log Decomposition project at a field

site on the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in 1997.

Martha Brookes
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

201

with few parallels. He considered the general theme of log decomposition such a

“basic question” that it was open to almost limitless possibilities. Where others

emphasized the expansive, temporal scale of the study, Harmon perceived an opportunity to miniaturize the scale of ecosystem studies. Referring to the log study,

he observes, “It’s like a mini-ecosystem. Lots of times ... [we] have a hard time

measuring what’s going on in a big ecosystem. But this was like a little, miniecosystem.” The study was Harmon’s answer to critics who claimed that ecosystem research lacked scientific rigor. In that miniaturized system, he argued,

scientists could measure “all the things you could measure in an ecosystem,” and

they could design experiments that tested ecosystem processes with measurable

results that could be replicated or tested with other experiments.42

The log-decomposition study continued the IBP’s emphasis on studies of oldgrowth ecosystems, but it also built on earlier, management-oriented studies of

regeneration, growth, and yield. In Harmon’s efforts to formulate a study design

that would eventually span 200 years, moreover, growth-and-yield studies were

among the few prototypes available for genuinely long-term research. Even those

long-term studies, however, were poor models because the log-decomposition

project was not primarily intended as a management-oriented study. Referring to

his search for precursors or potential models for the log study, Harmon observes

that even with studies of litter decay, including leaves and other small debris, “a

long study was a year. People hadn’t even acknowledged that even [litter decay]

took decades. So, there weren’t many decomposition experiments that went

beyond a year or two.”43

The group’s willingness to trust Harmon with a study so symbolic of their

long-term commitment to the Andrews Forest was ironic, given his almost complete lack of prior involvement and tenuous status. The paradox of a tightly knit

community handing over their legacy to a raw recruit, however, is more apparent

than real. Harmon’s background reads like a roadmap to previous traditions of

recruitment into the group, and many of those with more established records at

the Andrews Forest could easily recognize pieces of themselves embedded in

Harmon’s past. He was new blood from an old vein. Like McKee, Harmon hailed

from New England, and although he attended Amherst for his undergraduate

degree, he also headed south for his graduate work. Like Dyrness, he was an

undergraduate convert to ecology, and after a brief, postgraduate stint at Glacier

42 Interview with Mark Harmon, 14.

43 Interview with Mark Harmon, 13.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

202

National Park, Harmon took the advice of a fellow Amherst graduate at Glacier and

headed to the University of Tennessee. At Tennessee, Harmon, like Gregory, was

drawn into closer involvement with the Park Service, working at Great Smokies

National Park and with scientists involved with research programs at Oak Ridge

National Laboratories. Like Dyrness, Harmon’s prior experience in Oregon was

limited to a jaunt through the Pacific Northwest as an undergraduate. He hitchhiked

down the Oregon coast from Seattle in the early 1970s as part of a break from a

summer excursion to Nevada, where he helped his brother build a house. Like

Swanson and Gregory, Harmon traces his evolving scientific interests through a

series of summer research camps and field experiences at sites remote from his

original home and from his eventual involvement at the Andrews. He recounts, for

example, a conversion of sorts that he experienced while attending a geology summer camp in Montana: “I found out I was not going to be a geologist because I, I

just absolutely [had no talent] as a geologist.”44

Harmon’s brief experience hitchhiking through the Pacific Northwest stimulated his abiding interest in big trees. His research interests subsequently moved in

the direction of vegetation studies, eventually leading to his involvement with the

Andrews group.45 Harmon’s interests met his future in the mid 1970s at a conference in Athens, Georgia, where he happened to encounter Kermit Cromack and

Jim Sedell. Over the next 4 years, he more frequently encountered members of

the group at other conferences. He particularly recalls McKee, Sedell, and Franklin

presenting their research from the Hoh River Pulse, shortly before Harmon considered transferring to OSU to begin his doctoral work. Of the Andrews group, he

observes, “even then [late 1970s], they were known for real integrated studies.

We would hear crazy things ... about people climbing trees with ropes, and all

kinds of strange things going on out in the Northwest. So, it sounded like a really

interesting place.” The key to his involvement, however, was an incidental contact

with Franklin when Harmon was working as a guide in the Great Smokies: “I

guided him; he came right at the height of fall color season, and [it was] a perfect

time for Jerry.” In the course of their encounter in the woods, Harmon discussed

graduate school with Franklin, who suggested there might be some opportunities

for funding at OSU. Harmon was also attracted by the “whole idea of integrated

work and also working in a team.”46

44 Interview with Mark Harmon, 1-5.

45 Interview with Mark Harmon, 4.

46 Interview with Mark Harmon, 1, 4.

Even then [late

1970s], they were

known for real integrated studies. We

would hear crazy

things ... about

people climbing

trees with ropes,

and all kinds of

strange things.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

203

Harmon began his postdoctoral appointment about the time his mentor began

to distance himself from OSU. By the time Franklin left to take a sabbatical at

Harvard Forest early in 1985, Harmon had developed a personal, long-term interest in collaborative research at the Andrews. After setting up the log study, he was

determined to stay with it, and he was sold on the opportunities for research he had

identified while compiling the literature review. He enthusiastically embraced the

group’s ideal of integrated work and team research, and he found it “exciting” to

work in a place where people were actually putting those principles into practice.47

Watching Puddles Dry Up and Logs Fall Apart

In designing a study intended to last 200 years, Harmon saw the opportunity to link

many previous, briefer studies at the Andrews Forest. He envisioned a program of

research that would be a central reference point for everyone connected with the

group. Harmon, therefore, designed the log study as a “temporal backbone” for a

whole series of experiments, observations, and measurements. He and other scientists in the group could design and implement a wide range of research in a fashion

that would link them all together, through time. In that sense, Harmon conceived of

the log study as “just a series of linked short-term studies.” Those shorter, linked

studies would generate interim results with immediate utility, while the long-term

study proceeded through the next two centuries. “You would have to be an idiot,

to wait two hundred years,” Harmon explains, “and we were not idiots. We were

going to keep working on this.”48

The log study epitomized the group’s goal of promoting collaborative, longterm research that would also be useful to forest managers. That strategy, however, involved some risks. If they focused exclusively on research with practical

applications, the group might encourage the idea that basic science was, by comparison, irrelevant, or trivial. Instead, they emphasized basic science as a foundation for applied research, and they stressed the value of field-testing scientific

theories. In that sense, the log-decomposition study resembled the stream team’s

47 Interview with Jerry Franklin, 25-26; interview with Mark Harmon, 18.

48 Interview with Mark Harmon, 12.
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contributions to the riparian management plan for the Willamette National Forest.49

Both efforts encouraged collaboration and synthesis. The riparian management

plan, conceptually, applied insights from the river-continuum effort and, more

broadly, from the whole set of forest-stream interactions work at the Andrews

Forest. It was also collaborative in the sense that it was the product of the

Willamette National Forest Riparian Task Force. That body included managers,

planners, and district staff associated with the national forest, as well as scientists

involved with the Andrews group. The task force laid out guidelines for establishing riparian resource values, landscape management, basin management, harvest

49 Stan Gregory and Linda Ashkenas, “Riparian Management Guide: Willamette National

Forest” (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific

Northwest Region, 1990). The path of ideas leading to this result include William R.

Meehan, Frederick J. Swanson, and James R. Sedell, “Influences of Riparian Vegetation

on Aquatic Ecosystems With Particular Reference to Salmonid Fishes and Their Food

Supply.” In: Importance, Preservation and Management of Riparian Habitat: a

Symposium; 1977 July 9; Tuscon, AZ (Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Gen. Tech. Rep.

RM-43, 1977), 137-145; Frederick J. Swanson, Richard J. Janda, Thomas Dunne,

Douglas N. Swanston (eds.), Sediment Budgets and Routing in Forested Drainage Basins

(Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest

Research Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-141, 1982), 165; Stanley V. Gregory, Frederick

J. Swanson, Arthur W. McKee, and Kenneth W. Cummins, “An Ecosystem Perspective

of Riparian Zones,” Bioscience 41(1991)8: 540-551. These concepts, Swanson observes,

similarly found a place in later efforts to develop regional management strategies such as

the Northwest Forest Plan.

Figure 39—Mark Harmon and others placing logs in Lookout Creek in July 1985

as part of the Stream/Upland Decomposition Comparison study.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

205

unit management, riparian rehabilitation, and monitoring responsibilities on the

Willamette National Forest. The log study, similarly, was a group effort to organize

and synthesize information in topical areas.

The riparian plan and the log study both dealt with “basic science issues,”

although the science attracted less publicity than the planned duration of the research or its management implications. In the public eye, McKee observes, the

log study was “like watching mud puddles dry up.” To the participating scientists,

however, it involved experimental designs that tested fundamental concepts in

exciting new ways not previously possible. In each case, the social interaction of

the group encouraged individual scientists to question the obvious, adding insight,

depth, and immediacy to the concept of long-term research. Their close association

with other scientists and land managers while attending monthly meetings, riding in

vans to field sites, standing on landings, or pointing down a stream, helped them

work and laugh together, without rancor, even when they disagreed on particulars.

That characteristic helped the group bridge the apparent gap between basic research and applied studies.50

Explicit links between the log study and other prominent research previously

accomplished at the Andrews shielded Harmon’s work from potential ridicule for

its impossibly ambitious timeframe. Harmon emphasized the study’s similarities

with previous work at the Andrews. He had previously worked with permanent

plots for measuring forest growth—many were tagged and measured at regular

intervals across more than 70 years. Those studies began with people who placed

the original tags, even though they knew that someone else would have to follow

up on their work. Without that initial effort, Harmon noted, “We wouldn’t be doing

what we’re doing now. We wouldn’t have all that information. To me it wasn’t that

different.” The most obvious difference was Harmon’s effort to improve on the

experimental design: “... instead of the trees just growing on their own, we actually

had to put these things [logs] out ... we couldn’t just go with what was there, and

... have a good experiment.” The integrity of the experimental design was, in fact,

Harmon’s central concern: “It wasn’t enough to put out a bunch of logs and say,

‘Gee whiz.’ You had to have some pretty tight hypotheses. So, actually, before I

ever went down to the Andrews, I spent a lot of time just thinking what those

would be, and how they would ... lead to a [general] model of decay.”51

50 Interview with Mark Harmon, 11-12; Andrews History Project Workshop of 7 August

1996, 18.

51 Interview with Mark Harmon, 11-12.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

206

Harmon anticipated criticism of the log study, and he launched a pre-emptive

effort to define the ground on which critics would have to stand or fall by

their arguments. In July 1985, he sent copies of the initial study plan to Louise

Mastrantonio, Research Information Services at PNW Station in Portland, requesting help in filming and otherwise recording efforts to install the experiment. The

study plan, he observed, was designed to test the effect on decay of log species

and logs of different sizes, as well as the relation of invertebrates to rates of decay.

In his letter to Mastrantonio, he also stressed plans to initiate “a series of detailed

process-oriented studies on the interactions between microbes and invertebrates.”52

The Station publication PNW News reported the beginning of the study that month,

outlining plans to place “logs of specified ages, sizes, and species at six locations

on the Experimental Forest, in an attempt to standardize initial log conditions and

natural processes.” Aside from the long-term, 200-year goals of the study, the report stressed the initial objective for the first 5 years of the study to “characterize

and quantify the roles of insects in the colonization of logs by decay organisms,

such as fungi and bacteria. This will be accomplished by screening a selected

set of logs to keep insects out.” The study involved replication at six sites on the

Andrews Forest, for a total of 500 logs, in an effort to ensure the long-term project

would survive unplanned disturbances and to sample some of the climate variability

of the forest landscape. The effort was funded with a timber sale on the Andrews

Forest, with grants from the NSF through the LTER program, and with funds from

PNW Station. Other grants also funded subsequent phases of the study.53

The experimental design required field placement of logs under controlled

and replicable conditions. The scale of the logs and the planned duration of the

study required close coordination with district managers and contractors. Steve

Eubanks, District Ranger at Blue River, developed a critical-path diagram for the

project because, as Harmon recalls, “The fear was that [the project] ... was just

too ... complicated and complex, and ... we just had to make sure that this wasn’t

an embarrassment and a boondoggle.” Harmon and Eubanks “spent a lot of time”

discussing possible, worst-case scenarios: “‘What if it snows in September?’ Or,

... ‘What if something breaks down?’ And, ‘How late can we go, how will we

address this problem?’” From the start, the scientists and managers involved in

52 Mark E. Harmon to Louise Mastrantonio [letter] 12 July 1985.

53 PNW News (1 July 1985); Mark E. Harmon, “Long-Term Experiments on Log

Decomposition at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest” (Portland, OR: U.S.

Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Gen.

Tech. Rep. PNW-280, 1991).

The scale of the logs

and the planned

duration of the study

required close

coordination with

district managers

and contractors.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

207

the effort recognized the potential for a public relations nightmare. Harmon worked

with district personnel to address strategic and tactical concerns. In some ways,

he admits, the plan was “literally a crazy idea. To take sound trees, cut them down,

drag them out into the woods and stick them out to rot was, you know, ‘Oh my

God.’” Among others who Harmon worked with at the Blue River Ranger District,

Vince Pulao helped him decide from which sites to take trees, based on the feasibility of getting them out. Once the overall strategy was determined, Harmon and

Pulao spent “a lot of time” working out the details of how they would “actually get

access” to the sites, using old roads or other strategies.54

Harmon notes that Forest Service managers were “not too involved” in planning the basic experiment, but they became “more and more involved” during

implementation. They adopted the acronym “D-Day” (for “duck day”) in planning

field operations, anticipating a negative public reaction as details of the effort

became more apparent to outside observers. Mostly, however, they were concerned about pragmatic engineering concerns. Once the logs were acquired from

54 Interview with Mark Harmon, 9-10.

Figure 40—This group of volunteers who worked on the Log Decomposition

study in 1985 included Karen Luchessa, John Moreau, and a crew of student

helpers from Oregon State University. Shown here on the steps of the old

McRae trailer on the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest headquarters site, the

crew placed the logs in the component of the study involving the Stream/

Upland Decomposition Comparison.

Mark Harmon, June 1985
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

208

the donor sites, they had to be placed into the host sites. That second phase was

the reverse of a normal logging operation, and the group considered the feasibility

of moving the logs into intact stands with cable systems. The district staff, however, convinced McKee and Harmon that if they installed a small, temporary road

to provide access for “regular logging machinery,” then loaders could place the

logs with more accuracy and care. In the end, Harmon concludes, “They were

right, actually.” Out of 500 logs placed for the study, only 1 small tree on a single

site had to be removed to make room for the equipment used to place the log.55

The entire operation of putting 500 logs of various species and sizes at 6 places

on the Andrews Forest was completed in the month of September 1985, from

felling the first tree to placing the last log. After the initial installation effort, much

of it with volunteer labor supplied by cooperators in the Andrews group, Harmon

continued the study with little direct assistance. Once the logs were at the appropriate sites, he required an additional 5 months to install the remainder of the study.

This included, in Harmon’s words, “an awful lot of work to describe what they

looked like at first.” He then proceeded with the planned, experimental manipulations, cutting sections off each log at both ends, mapping them, and building insect

exclosures. Harmon began his analysis even before completing the installation. He

stored cross sections of logs measuring about 19.7 inches in diameter and 3.94

inches thick in a cooler at the Blue River Ranger District office. The “cookies” he

cut from the ends of the logs completely filled a 2,400-cubic-foot cooler originally

designed for storing seedlings. An interim progress report in Forestry Research

News (28 January 1986) detailed some of the procedures, including hand-trimming,

drying, measuring, and recording data on size, weight, and condition of more than

20,000 wood samples of Douglas-fir, western redcedar, western hemlock, and

Pacific silver fir. Each sample was bar-coded to facilitate tracking and future

analysis, and the inner and outer bark on the various wood samples was stripped

apart with wood chisels. Harmon’s study design also specified the same process

for each new sample from each of the 500 logs, scheduled at intervals of 1, 2, 3, 4,

5, 6, 8, 16, 24, 32, 60, 90, 120, 150 180, and 220 years.56

The concept of cutting down mature trees, sectioning them into logs, and

then spending money and resources to place that sound timber in the forest just

to watch them rot, was a public relations powderkeg. The study site was close

55 Interview with Mark Harmon, 10.

56 Interview with Mark Harmon, 10-11.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

209

to Blue River, a timber-dependent community suffering through economic decline

throughout the 1980s. Harmon recalls few expressions of concern from local

community leaders at the time, but the attitude of some of the people who actually

placed the logs was more of a problem. On the first day, Harmon recalls, “I went

up to check on the work, and the guy who was in the loader... he got out of there

and he just cursed a blue streak. He thought that this was just the stupidest,

damned idea he ever heard of. ‘What idiot came up with this?’ He went on and on.”

By the end of the month, however, Harmon observes, the equipment operators

were “quite proud of the work they did and they understood why they did it.” The

key was communication with people on the work sites. Harmon and others in the

group explained the theory and urging the operators to “Think about it this way,”

and he concludes, “they got convinced.” The atmosphere in timber towns in the

mid 1980s was arguably not as tense as it later became, during the crises of the

1990s, when Harmon argues the group would “get fried” if they tried the same

thing. Even in that more contentious decade, however, the log-decomposition sites

were a handy starting point for many field tours at the Andrews Forest. They

served as a dramatic example of basic science examining ecological processes like

decomposition and forest-stand composition and structure. Tours of the Andrews

Forest typically began with this study in the morning and then moved on to other

sites to show applications and demonstrate findings from the log-decomposition

study in actual land use practices.57

The ability to work closely with contracting loggers was a critical element of

a study that relied on funds from a timber sale on the Andrews Forest to finance

the implementation of the log “treatments.” The process resembled Silen’s earlier

efforts to devise an experimental road system funded with timber sales that included detailed specifications written into the contract. Silen had enforced those

provisions by cultivating a personal understanding with the contractor, Mike

Savelich. In the 1980s, however, the Blue River Ranger District assumed more

of the burden of planning and administering the sales. Harmon and Pulao worked

with Eubanks to devise contracts that specified placing logs at the various sites.

Eubanks then assumed responsibility for making the process as seamless as

possible. He worked to “implement a fair amount of the installation of that research” as part of the timber sale. Each contract required the logger to build the

57 Interview with Mark Harmon, 11; communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

210

roads, take the logs from the harvest area, put them on a truck with a self-loader,

take them to the installation site, and set them in place. Eubanks worked to ensure

that the contractors and the researchers communicated at each step in that process. In his own estimation, it was a “very nontraditional approach” that “saved a

lot of research money for other things.”58

Harmon’s effort to explain the scientific basis for the detailed specifications

in the timber-sale contracts effectively prevented a rift with the local, timberdependent community. Beyond the immediate vicinity of Blue River and the other

timber towns where those loggers lived, however, critics of the study were more

numerous and potentially threatening. As with other new projects, the log study

was incorporated into “show-me” tours of the Andrews, and although it was not

the only study with controversial implications, he notes it was “probably one of

the highlights.” It was popular, he suspects, because, “at least in a bizzaro sense ...

you could say you went and you saw where the insane people were.”59 One of the

most blunt and intimidating challenges he encountered came from the dean of the

college where Harmon was still a graduate student, and where he was angling for

an eventual postdoctoral appointment. Harmon recalls that Dean Carl Stoltenberg,

College of Forestry at OSU, sat down across from him at a dinner after one such

tour and, as Harmon recalls, said, “This is the most stupid ... thing I’ve ever heard

of in my life.”60

Stoltenberg’s response was just one example of a general skepticism that

Harmon attributes to the relative novelty of doing long-term, ecological research.

“At that time,” Harmon notes, “... the value of long-term studies in ecological work

was still up in the air. In subsequent years, however, the results of the study began

to validate the premise that initially inspired the log-decomposition proposal in the

first place: “People realize that a lot of short-term results are often just misleading.

That you have to actually look at it in a longer framework, ... or you don’t know

what the results mean.” In the late 1980s, however, that premise “wasn’t necessarily clear. And we got lots of comments like, ‘200-year study, that’s a long time to

wait for results’... you’ll be dead.’ Nice things like that.”

58 Interview by Max Geier with Steve Eubanks on 9 January 1998 in Eubanks’ Office at

the Chippewa National Forest, Minnesota, as transcribed by Elizabeth Foster, 16.

59 Interview with Mark Harmon, 33.

60 Interview with Mark Harmon, 12.

“At that time,”

Harmon notes,

“... the value of

long-term studies in

ecological work was

still up in the air.”
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

211

Wildlife Studies and the Reconstructed Landscape

The group’s LTER funding and the relatively secure, supportive involvement of the

Willamette National Forest rendered Stoltenberg’s criticism essentially toothless.

Over the next decade, however, the log study raised the stakes for other initiatives

on the Andrews Forest. As an emblem of long-term research, collaborative relations

with forest managers, and conceptual innovation, the 200-year study was a hard

act to follow. It was a dramatic hook for reporters seeking an unusual story line,

and numerous news reports and magazine articles popularized Harmon’s work by

the end of the first 5-year interval.61 The study elevated terrestrial programs of

research into the spotlight previously dominated by old-growth forest and riparian

studies at the Andrews Forest, but it also raised expectations for future proposals.

The detailed process of designing the log-decomposition study also uncovered gaps

in the fields of research represented among cooperators in the group. Those gaps

of expertise attracted more attention in the group through the latter half of the

1980s and into the next decade. As Harmon explains, much of his prior work with

Franklin focused on how things changed or evolved in an old-growth forest. The

log study simply inverted the logic to explore how things fell apart. That study’s

emphasis on decomposers, however, highlighted questions about animal activity in

old-growth stands. Previous wildlife studies on the experimental forest focused

largely on regenerating stands. The log study, however, raised issues that demonstrated the relevance of early research by people relatively peripheral to the group

but critical to that community’s collective grasp of old-growth issues.

Wildlife biologist Chris Maser and mycologist James Trappe, for example,

ranged broadly through forests of the Pacific Northwest, including the Andrews

Forest, to study the relation between small mammals and fungi found in association

with decaying timber. Maser, who worked with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and Trappe, who worked with PNW Station and then (after retirement from

the Forest Service) with OSU at the Corvallis Forestry Sciences Laboratory, began

their collaboration during the 1970s, exploring the relation between decaying logs,

61 Harmon compiled a hefty file of newsclippings covering the study beginning, for

example with a report of the initial installation, which was covered in the Eugene Register

Guard (3 March 1986), and continuing into the 1990s, including a front-page article in

the Sunday edition of the [Salem] Statesman Journal (17 June 1990). See also, Robert

Heilman, “Coarse Woody Debris: the Underside of Forestry” Forest World (Fall 1988):

36-40.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

212

fungi, small mammals (including the northern flying squirrel and the California

red-backed vole), and the nutrient-cycling processes that sustain living trees in

old-growth forests. Much of their work during the 1970s and early 1980s included collaboration with members of the Andrews group. Trappe maintains,

however, that his own work was mostly peripheral to the experimental forest,

aside from occasional trips there for gathering fungi. One of his graduate students,

Makoto Ogawa, also worked at the Andrews Forest with IBP funding while devising the five-class decay classification scheme for coarse woody debris that subsequently became the standard for work in west-side forests of the Cascade Range.

Their combined efforts demonstrated the importance of more systematic studies to

understand the ecological role of wildlife in old-growth forests. Despite the work

of people like Maser and Trappe, however, wildlife studies were a weak link in the

legacy of interdisciplinary cooperation at the Andrews.62

The comparatively light emphasis on wildlife studies was a product of the perceptions of scientists involved with the Coniferous Biome. Their activities, interests, and concerns had redefined priorities at the Andrews Forest during the 1970s.

The relative dearth of wildlife studies in that era was a shortcoming that often went

unnoticed amid the many accomplishments of the group, although Swanson notes

they “often get ‘dinged’ [by outside reviewers] for not having more wildlife work

and having it integrated.”63 Within the group, this lapse also attracted the attention

of Phil Sollins, a soil scientist who contributed a somewhat unusual perspective

to the group in the course of his nearly three decades of involvement with that

community.

Unlike many others in the group, Sollins was unimpressed with the “big trees”

at the Andrews Forest, and he preferred to study the more-hidden parts of that

ecosystem. One of his many studies suggested the need for more wildlife research

at that facility. His unique perspective is, at least in part, rooted in his west-coast

upbringing, which is unusual in the group. Sollins, a Los Angeles native, frequented

redwood forests on family camping trips in the 1940s and 1950s. That experience

influenced his later perceptions of the Andrews Forest. “I certainly had seen big

trees and seen bigger trees,” he observes, “so this [old-growth Douglas-fir] ... was

62 Interview with Jim Trappe by Max Geier on 15 September 1997 in Trappe’s office at

the FSL, Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Keesje Hoekstra, 1-3; Chris Maser and James

M. Trappe, tech. eds. The Seen and Unseen World of the Fallen Tree (Portland, OR: U.S.

Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-164, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of

the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, 1984).

63 Interview with Mark Harmon, 5; communication from Fred Swanson, 1998.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

213

nice but it wasn’t anything unusual.” That was an uncommon view in the group,

except for Waring, who also came to the Andrews Forest after extensive experience in California. Little about the place struck Sollins as remarkable. Even the

amount of precipitation failed to impress him because he was accustomed to the

tropical forests of Puerto Rico, where he once lived as a youth. People and science, not the characteristics of the local or regional landscape, attracted Sollins to

the Andrews. Sollins had worked with the renowned scientist, Tom Odum, while

finishing his graduate studies at the University of North Carolina and the University

of Tennessee. He also worked on the Eastern Deciduous Biome of the IBP at Oak

Ridge National Laboratories. That work plugged him into other sites in the IBP

network, and he joined the Coniferous Biome in the early 1970s. By that time, he

already had considerable expertise and experience in the areas of nutrient cycling,

biomass estimation, stem flow, water chemistry, and computer programming. He

initially split his time between Andrews-affiliated modeling efforts and the Coniferous Biome components centered on the University of Washington until 1975,

when he moved to Corvallis. Thereafter, he worked on soft-money appointments

at OSU and focused more exclusively on the Andrews component of the Biome

Figure 41—Phil Sollins, shown here in 1979, was

less impressed with the big trees on the H.J.

Andrews Experimental Forest than some of his

colleagues, owing to his prior experience among

California redwoods. His fresh outlook helped shift

the group’s focus to less visible components of the

old-growth forest. Rollie Geppart

People and science,

not the characteristics of the local or

regional landscape,

attracted Sollins to

the Andrews.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

214

until 1991, when he secured a tenure-track appointment in the Forest Science

Department at OSU.64

The group’s relative inability to expand on earlier wildlife studies at the

Andrews Forest during the biome became a concern for Sollins when he encountered difficulty with a study of snowbrush that did not develop as expected.65 One

ongoing thread of research at the Andrews Forest involved studies of nutrient cycling and the role of species associated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, such as red

alder along streams or snowbrush in the uplands. Continuing that thread of inquiry

into the 1980s, Sollins set up a study on the Andrews that was designed to evaluate

soil nutrients in relation to the amount of snowbrush on a particular site. The study

called for a clearcut followed by a hot, prescribed burn. Sollins worked closely

with the Blue River Ranger District to coordinate that treatment. “We were trying

to kill everything,” he observes, “... [and] when we‘d plant Doug-fir, Ceanothus

[snowbrush] would out-compete the Douglas-fir and we’d be able to study the

competition.” The plan didn’t work: “We did everything we could to encourage the

64 Interview with Phil Sollins by Max Geier on 24 September 1997 at Sollins’ office, FSL,

Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Jeff Prater and Elisabeth Foster, 1-2, 5.

65 Interview with Phil Sollins, 10.

Figure 42—Dave Perry, shown here in a characteristic pose in

the 1980s, was a forest ecologist with the Andrews group who

helped drive research at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest

in the direction of more extensive long-term programs of

research.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

215

Ceanothus. We got 20, 30, 40 thousand [snowbrush seedlings] per hectare germinating and they never grew. The Doug-fir just took off, totally.” Contrary to

Sollins’ expectations, virtually all of the snowbrush on the treated study area died

or languished.66

Sollins and his cooperator at OSU, forest ecologist Dave Perry, scrambled to

rescue the study by isolating the factors limiting snowbrush growth. Despite concerted efforts, they never identified a clear solution to the puzzle, but they had

many theories about what “went wrong.”67 Sollins suspects that the study failed

for reasons related to changes in hunting regulations that promoted wildlife recovery in the vicinity, but he had little to go on. The group had not established a base

of wildlife research sufficient to support a rigorous postmortem on the snowbrush study. As the population of elk and bear increased at the Andrews Forest,

the problem of inadequate wildlife studies became more acute. Observing that the

group has done “excellent work” on studies of streams, insects, birds, and bats,

Sollins suggests, “It would be nice if we could get some more work than we have

on this [large wildlife species].” About the time the snowbrush study mysteriously

derailed, he observes, “the elk herds took off [rapidly increased in number].” He

postulates that “over-hunting had just finally been stopped and the elk herds were

finally widely established and this was the first year which they [elk] really started

coming around the Andrews again.” Given the opportunity to browse on snowbrush, he concludes, “Elk prefer it to Doug-fir.” Lacking any structured wildlife

studies examining elk behavior on the Andrews Forest in that period, however,

Sollins was at a loss to prove his theory, which might have had far-reaching

implications. Efforts to manage snowbrush with herbicides during the 1970s

triggered controversy about the environmental implications of aerial spraying. When

elk populations recovered, Sollins observes, that controversy “sort of dropped out

of the picture.”68

Conclusion

The efforts of people like Maser, Trappe, Harmon, and Sollins clearly demonstrated

by the late 1980s the importance of wildlife issues to collaborative studies of forest ecology. Wildlife could not be ignored if scientists and land managers hoped to

66 Interview with Phil Sollins, 9.

67 Interview with Phil Sollins, 9.

68 Interview with Phil Sollins, 9.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

216

develop a clear, practical understanding of ecosystem processes in Pacific Northwest forests. Wildlife issues, indeed, loomed large in the future for managers of

public lands in the United States, where popular interest in ecological issues had

escalated rapidly in the previous two decades. The group was better positioned for

responsive engagement with new issues than for any particular concern in the late

1980s, and the key to their preparedness was the Andrews Forest itself.

People in the group were stewards of a relatively intact expanse of native forest

in a setting that permitted manipulation of that resource for research purposes. The

group had imposed a stricter test of scientific relevance on management activities

at the Andrews Forest during the 1970s, which amounted to a virtual moratorium

on nonsalvage timber sales in the Lookout Creek. Timber harvests and road building on neighboring drainages of the Willamette National Forest, meanwhile, rapidly

escalated through the 1980s. As a result, people who joined the group during that

decade saw the Andrews Forest in a new light. It was an accessible reserve of

intensively studied, regenerating, older clearcuts and stands of old growth within a

larger, patchwork landscape of more recent timber harvests, road projects, recreational developments, and other activities on the Willamette National Forest. The

place, however, was relatively underdeveloped, by comparison with other research

facilities funded with LTER grants, and the group played up that fact in their search

for additional support. The NSF reviewers who cycled through the Andrews Forest

on “show-me” tours through the late 1980s could hardly accuse the group of profligate spending. It was a skeletal, shoe-string operation with a make-do ethic that

was patently obvious to even the most casual observer. The group promoted the

Andrews Forest as a place of mystical attraction where people subsidized scientific

programs with voluntary effort. People came to the place for emotional, as well as

pragmatic reasons. They found the place inspiring, and they forged new ties with

other people in that setting. The result was a community that supported scientific

research in both a spiritual and a practical sense.

That context of over 40 years of continuous monitoring and data management

at the Andrews Forest helped the group adapt quickly to new demands for research

on old-growth and other issues. They could speak with authority, if not definitiveness, on native forest ecosystems. Their successful efforts to collaborate across

disciplines and in cooperation with forest managers earlier in the decade also helped

them cope with the intense pressure of a changing political environment. Finally,

their ability to mobilize intellectual and community resources beyond the Andrews

Forest in response to the Mount St. Helens event demonstrated a potential for

responsive engagement with real-world concerns. The group was poised to dramatically expand its public role and consciously exploit its professional influence.

The group promoted

the Andrews Forest

as a place of mystical attraction where

people subsidized

scientific programs

with voluntary effort.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

217

Chapter Six: The Old-Growth Debate and the

Andrews

Wildlife studies, for the most part, lagged well behind other areas of research at the

H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews Forest) through the end of the century, but one such project transformed the group’s public role. Eric Forsman’s

behavioral study of the northern spotted owl focused public attention on oldgrowth forests in the Pacific Northwest. That development provided a dramatic

new focal point for the Andrews group. Forsman’s owl study had more impact

on people in that collaborative community than his involvement with them, although

he earned all three of his undergraduate and graduate degrees in wildlife management at Oregon State University (OSU). Forsman, a native of Eugene, worked with

OSU fisheries and wildlife professor Charles E. Meslow during the early 1970s and

finished his Master’s thesis in 1976.1

 That work focused on the Andrews Forest,

but it also included field work elsewhere, notably on the nearby O&C Forest [lands

previously included in a since-terminated land-grant to a 19th century railroad, the

Oregon and California, now administered by the Bureau of Land Management]. His

subsequent Ph.D. dissertation project ranged more broadly. It was a detailed, yet

far-ranging assessment of the owl’s habitat needs and distribution. At the height

of the International Biological Programme (IBP) era, the Andrews Forest was an

obvious locale for an OSU graduate student seeking field sites among extensive

stands of old-growth Douglas-fir readily accessible by road. Many of his peers

and professors already worked at other sites on that drainage. He and Meslow

collaborated with seven other scientists in a report on spotted owls on the

Willamette National Forest, and the group included that report in its compilation

of Andrews-related research.2 Forsman’s primary significance to the group, however, was indirect. His linkage of the spotted owl with old-growth habitat prompted two decades of intense scientific scrutiny of this bird and its habitat needs in

1

 Eric Forsman, “A Preliminary Investigation of the Spotted Owl in Oregon” (M.S.

thesis, Oregon State University, 1976); Jack Ward Thomas, Eric D. Forsman, Joseph B.

Lint, and others, “A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Spotted Owl” (Portland,

OR: Interagency Scientific Committee to Address the Conservation of the Northern

Spotted Owl, Report, May 1990), 51.

2

 E.C. Meslow, E.D. Forsman, K.A. Swindle, S.M. Desimone, G.A. Lehman, S. Adey, J.

Buck, T.A. Church, and T.L. Cutler, “The Ecology of Spotted Owls on the Willamette

National Forest: Habitat Use and Demography” (Corvallis, OR: Oregon Cooperative

Wildlife Research Unit, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State University,

annual research report, FY 1992). Eric Forsman, “A Preliminary Investigation of the

Spotted Owl in Oregon,” 126; Eric Forsman, “Habitat Utilization by Spotted Owls in the

West-Central Cascades of Oregon” (Ph.D. diss., Oregon State University, 1980), 95.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

218

relation to federal and state standards of forest management in the Pacific Northwest. The group had little direct involvement in that effort, but the owl inquiry

raised the stakes for ecosystems research at the Andrews Forest.

The prolonged inquiry into the biology and habitat needs of the northern spotted

owl forced state and federal agencies to revise guidelines for forest management

to reduce adverse effects on this species. Managers tried to determine the optimal

size and arrangement for habitat conservation areas in old-growth forest. By the

mid 1980s, that effort was deeply entangled with the science issues of the owl’s

habitat needs and with public policies mandating multiple uses for national forest

lands.3

 After a convoluted and contentious process, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Service proposed in 1989 that the northern spotted owl warranted protection as

a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Two federal

agencies responsible for managing public lands in the owl’s range subsequently

assembled an interagency task force charged with developing a “scientifically

credible” conservation strategy for the northern spotted owl. The Forest Service

collaborated in the effort with three agencies in the Department of the Interior: the

Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park

Service. That group submitted its report in early 1990.4

The owl report weighed heavily on timber-dependent communities already

suffering from a depressed regional economy hard hit by a slump in the construction industry, declining competitiveness in global markets, and corporate restructuring. Reactions in those communities lurched from anger and resentment toward

resigned despair as residents who already faced a bleak outlook for future employment anticipated the fallout.5

 The report noted the owl’s dependence on old-growth

conditions and proposed a drastic expansion of habitat-conservation areas to include large tracts of old-growth and other forest types. It also proposed opening to

3

 For an example of how these issues intersected, see E.D. Forsman and E.C. Meslow,

“Old Growth Forest Retention for Spotted Owls, How Much Do They Need?” In: R.J.

Gutierrez and A.B. Carey, eds., Ecology and Management of the Spotted Owl in the

Pacific Northwest (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific

Northwest Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-185, 1985), 58-59.

4 Thomas, Forsman, Lint, and others, “A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Spotted

Owl,” 51-57.

5 William Dietrich, “The Final Forest: the Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific

Northwest” (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 72-85; William G. Robbins, “Hard Times in

Paradise.”
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

219
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

220

logging and other uses some areas previously off limits, and it proposed managing

selected stands of second growth to hasten the development of old-growth conditions. That strategy, of course, required answers to two questions: “What are oldgrowth conditions, and how does one manage for those conditions?” The Andrews

group in 1990 was remarkably well positioned to address these questions.

Much was at stake beyond the owl’s immediate survival. Public debate over

the future of forest management on public lands was heated in the late 20th century.

A political backlash against the environmental initiatives of the early 1970s took

root near the end of that decade and flourished during the presidencies of Ronald

Reagan and George Bush, from 1981 through 1992. The debate about federal and

state priorities for managing public lands included a conservative reconstruction

of Congressional mandates after the 1994 federal elections. Members of Congress

intensively scrutinized management practices on national forests, particularly in the

Pacific Northwest. Timber production in the region was a central feature of the

postwar economy. Forest policy issues reverberated through local and state politics

and preoccupied congressional delegates from the Pacific Northwest. The human

demographics of the issue, however, changed during the mid 1980s. People who

depended on timber jobs found themselves increasingly outnumbered by people in

other sectors of the economy, especially urban dwellers, for whom timber was not

necessarily a leading priority.

Acceptable standards of stewardship over forest resources on the national forests in the Pacific Northwest, consequently, were a dynamic management concern

in the 1980s and 1990s. The scientists and managers responsible for the Andrews

Forest during those years were no more capable of controlling these forces than

their predecessors had been in the first decades after World War II. For the most

part, the old-growth debate of the late 20th century took the group by surprise.

Their applied-science focus, their maniacal persistence in long-term studies, and

their collaborative effort, however, positioned people in the group as acknowledged

authorities on this and related issues. They were able to tap into networks of support nurtured and cultivated over previous decades of research at the Andrews

Forest. Most important, their ability to adapt, respond, and act brought them

national prominence as consulting professionals who helped shape a strategy for

the next century. By the last decade of the 20th century, they were in the unaccustomed position of working as first-source consultants, managing facilities and

programs that inspired envy, awe, and even resentment from their peers. The story

of the Andrews group during these years is the story of a community discovering

The old-growth

debate of the late

20th century took the

group by surprise.

Most important,

their ability to adapt,

respond, and act

brought them national prominence.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

221

itself and then learning how to act with self-conscious authority when confronted

with crises beyond their control.

Modeling Sustainable Networks of Science and Community on a Managed Landscape

Forest Service and OSU scientists at Corvallis had previously launched joint efforts

to understand ecological composition and function in old-growth stands and watersheds at the Andrews Forest during and after the Coniferous Biome. In the intervening years, Franklin tried to impart a sense of urgency and mission to his

colleagues, encouraging them to focus on the science mission and to avoid petty

distinctions between agency and university scientists.6 Younger scientists picked

up on the theme, partially sacrificing their initial science interests in service to the

collaborative ideal. Gregory, for example, would have preferred to focus on fish,

and he had considerable latitude in the type of research project he could pursue for

his graduate work. His colleagues in the IBP, however, encouraged him to focus his

6 Interview with small-watersheds group, 19-20.

Figure 43—As the International Biological Programme wound down in the late

1970s, Jerry Franklin brainstormed the concept of a “pulse” as a sort of

scientific retreat generating a burst of creative energy and enthusiastic field

research that would help the Andrews group sustain a sense of common

purpose and community, thereby encouraging ongoing, collaborative studies.

Stan Gregory took this photo of Jerry Franklin in the Sierra Pulse in 1983.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

222

dissertation work within certain broad parameters: “It needed to be something in

the Andrews, and something that helped understand stream ecosystems, something

that wasn’t already being done.” Those parameters led Gregory to study primary

production in streams. His thesis focused on a clearcut section and an old-growth

section of Mack Creek on the Andrews Forest, where he studied rates of primary

production, and the nutrient dynamics associated with those rates. That focus

involved Gregory in what he describes as “one of the first truly multidisciplinary

ecosystem programs.” As a young graduate student, he was involved with Jim

Sedell, Jim Hall, Jerry Franklin, Dick Waring, and Kermit Cromack, and “lots of

other people” in an atmosphere where everyone in the program was “constantly

getting together and exchanging ideas and concepts about how ecosystems function.” It was an unparalleled learning experience and professional opportunity.7

By the time the Andrews group assembled for a working retreat at the Wind

River Experimental Forest in Washington in 1978, its members generally espoused

the collaborative ethic of the IBP as an ingrained tradition and shared value. They

were unconcerned with artificial distinctions between Forest Service or university

employees, or relative rank within those institutions, and unaffiliated, visiting

scientists swelled the ranks of those officially connected with either OSU or the

Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station. Their Wind River gathering was

intended as an opportunity to synthesize insights from a variety of divergent, yet

interrelated studies of old-growth forests and streams, and the group expected the

meeting would eventually lead to a publication reflecting that synthesis. Sedell and

his fellow conferees at that meeting were motivated by a collective sense that the

funding mechanisms on which they all relied would inexorably drive research

deeper into a tinkering mindset of small studies nibbling around the edges of larger

issues. As a remedy, they proposed to jointly articulate a new paradigm for research designed to address, more directly, public concerns about urgent ecological

problems. Whereas standard industry sources tended to fund questions like, “How

can we ‘up’ production and cut costs?” or “What’s the minimum [environmental

protection] we need?” Sedell and his colleagues at the Wind River meeting argued

they could tap into an emerging willingness, particularly in the National Science

Foundation (NSF), to fund basic studies that addressed more fundamental questions: “How does the system work and are we doing the things that keep the system working that way?” By the time of that 1978 meeting, those who attended the

7 Interview with Stan Gregory, 1.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

223

conference had worked together for nearly a decade. The pressures of securing

grants, tenure, positions, and promotion in federal agencies, academia, and private

industry, however, had discouraged formal integration of their work. The meeting

produced a publication that Sedell describes as a collaborative effort: “... there

were about six or eight of us authors that put together this book on the characteristics and function of old-growth forests, and that was just synthesizing bits and

pieces that we’d all done, to put it into a coherent story, and that was the first look

at those forests that way.” That government technical report,8

 he concludes, “had

more to do with focusing [research] on old-growth forests than anything.”9

The report, publicly released in 1981, provided the group with a central theme

around which they could weave a coherent program from the multiple strands of

research at the Andrews Forest. It included two major components: “Characteristics of old-growth forests” and “Managing for old-growth forests and attributes.”

Descriptive sections of the report explored the composition and function of forests and streams, and the structure of old-growth trees, snags, and logs on land

and in streams. Programmatic sections suggested strategies for “perpetuating or

re-creating old-growth forests,” including the distribution of old-growth management areas, and appropriate structural attributes to guide management planning

toward accomplishing these goals. The programmatic sections went well beyond

characterizing or describing old growth: they were a call for action. This report

confronted the group with the question of what management methods might be

needed to maintain ecological processes and structural features of old-growth

forests.10 In response to that question, people in the group acted. They shared their

collective insights on the processes and structure of the old-growth Douglas-fir

forest at Lookout Creek in a 2-week program offered in July 1981 as part of the

Continuing Education division of the College of Forestry at OSU.

The 2-week program drew on a wide range of Andrews collaborators and

resources, pairing a 5-day short course involving fieldwork at the Andrews Forest

with a 5-day workshop in Corvallis that focused on habitat types. This intensive,

two-stage program communicated scientific ideas and then illustrated their application in a real-world setting. Topics for the short course were a virtual catalogue of

8 Jerry F. Franklin, Kermit Cromack, Jr., William Denison, [and others], “Ecological

Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests” (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of

Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station,

Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-118, 1981), 48.

9 Interview with Jim Sedell, 18.

10 Interview with Jim Sedell, 18.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

224

research relevant to the questions swirling around the 1981 report. They included

methods for assessing biomass, leaf area, net production, stand vigor, and growth

efficiency; environmental controls on forest composition and function; techniques

for measuring environmental conditions; structural features, including old-growth

stands; tree canopies as complex ecosystems; nutrient cycling and nitrogen; coarse

woody debris in forests and streams; chronic erosion processes (creep) and catastrophic erosion processes (landslides); vegetation and geomorphic interactions;

riparian zones (structure and importance); stream channel stability; stream ecosystem structure and function (energy sources, invertebrates, fish, other vertebrates);

and contrasts between natural and managed ecosystems.11

The report and related events amounted to a coming-out party for many of the

scientists affiliated with the Andrews group, and not everyone hailed their arrival.

Public land policy in the Pacific Northwest during the early 1980s was a political

minefield. With few exceptions, these scientists had relatively little experience

negotiating that political terrain. The economy of the Pacific Northwest was mired

in a timber recession linked with double-digit inflation and a stagnant construction

industry. People who depended on the timber industry for their livelihood demanded

attention to their concerns. In that context, a misconception about the group gained

credence in the popular culture: State-funded scientists who studied old growth

at the Andrews Forest were supplying information that aided environmentalist

efforts to halt logging in old-growth forests. That perception led to an inquiry by

the Oregon State Legislature, which summoned McKee to explain why the state

was supporting research at the Andrews Forest that might buttress environmental

initiatives to protect old growth. McKee responded, “We don’t study just old

growth.”12

The group’s political support was unpredictable and tenuous by comparison

with its critics. Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio (Democrat) and Oregon

Senator Mark Hatfield (Republican) provided a strong, bipartisan, national base of

support for the Andrews Forest and related programs. Closer to home, however,

representatives in the Oregon State Legislature were often less open in their support, if not directly hostile, from the perspective of the group’s leadership. McKee

assigns much of the credit for defusing the legislative inquiry of the early 1980s

11 “H.J. Andrews short course for summer 1981” H.J. Andrews Files, File Box D, Storage

Vault, FSL, Corvallis, OR.

12 Andrews History Project Workshop of 7 August 1996, 34.

The Oregon

State Legislature

summoned McKee

to explain why the

state was supporting research that

might protect old

growth. McKee

responded, “We

don’t study just

old growth.”
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

225

to the legislative representatives for the district that included the Andrews Forest.

From his own perspective, however, he concludes that political and physical geography sometimes eroded their standing with political supporters in state and local

government: “We’ve had a diversity of support from some people at the state level

and county level ... [because] that state district keeps changing its boundaries.

They call it the helicopter district, because it’s a bunch of west-slope valleys

running north and south.” These westward-draining river valleys, separated by high

ridges, made it difficult to move around or campaign in the district except by air

and tended to separate people and interests in that district into separate enclaves

that lacked a cohesive central focus or direction.13

Management Transitions and Implications for Studies of Forest

Ecosystems

Faced with uncertain support from the state of Oregon, the group leaned more

heavily on its federal base and strengthened its ties with the management branch of

the Forest Service. They found a strong ally in Mike Kerrick, who took the helm as

forest supervisor for the Willamette National Forest shortly before the controversy

over old growth heated up in the Pacific Northwest. Kerrick’s previous career

wove in and out of the Andrews community five different times between 1952 and

1980, when he returned to the Willamette as forest supervisor.14 Even he, however,

was surprised to find that relations between managers at Blue River and researchers at the Andrews Forest had taken a cooperative turn by 1980. Jim Caswell, for

example, had replaced Robert Burns as District Ranger at Blue River a few years

before Kerrick’s return as forest supervisor. McKee credits Caswell with strengthening the “partnership” between district personnel and scientists with the group and

concluded he “really wanted to build that partnership into a stronger partnership.”15

Kerrick had gained an appreciation of the need for stronger links between managers and researchers during his previous stint as deputy forest supervisor with the

Coconino National Forest. His efforts to encourage better interaction between forest managers at Coconino and scientists engaged in research relevant to grazing

and water issues on that national forest never fully paid off because, he recalls, “it

was still a we-they kind of thing from the district standpoint.” By comparison with

13 Andrews History Project Workshop of 7 August 1996, 32.

14 Interview with Mike Kerrick, 14, 17-18.

15 Rakestraw, 133; interview with Mike Kerrick, 14, 17-18.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

226

the more-established, long-running conflict over grazing rights and water claims

in the American Southwest, the full implications of the emerging old-growth debate in the Pacific Northwest were less obvious to Kerrick when he returned to

the Willamette National Forest. He did, however, quickly grasp the need to ensure

that management practices would keep pace with science relevant to issues on

that national forest over the next decade. The potential for closer cooperation with

scientists at the Andrews, consequently, was a valued attribute of his new appointment.16 Kerrick, in short, had undergone something of a conversion since his earlier

years as Anderson’s protégé at the Blue River Ranger District. After 1980, he supported forest managers and staff at Blue River who showed an emerging interest

in research findings. The timing of this rapprochement was critical for the success

of the group, as the debate over old-growth forests brought research programs at

the Andrews Forest under increased scrutiny. The group’s proposal to establish the

Andrews as a National Field Research Facility coincided with Kerrick’s arrival, and

together, those two circumstances helped forge a stronger bond with managers at

the Blue River Ranger District. The NSF proposal called for a local advisory committee to include the district ranger at Blue River and representatives from the

Willamette National Forest and from the Pacific Northwest Regional Office.17

Kerrick’s goal of promoting stronger relations between managers and scientists

at the Andrews Forest came at an opportune moment in the history of that facility.

The group’s ability to secure renewable funding from the NSF in addition to ongoing support from the Forest Service and Oregon State built a more autonomous

base than would have been possible without that third leg of support. Scientists in

the group were also becoming more assertive in promoting management applications for their research, thanks in part to the more accommodating style of District

Ranger Caswell. When Caswell accepted a promotion to deputy forest supervisor in

Boise, Idaho, in 1983, scientists at the Andrews viewed his departure as an opportunity to play a more direct role in selecting his successor at Blue River.18 They

wanted to recruit a district ranger who would work more actively with the group

and break down some of the barriers separating research ideas at the Andrews

from management applications on the Blue River Ranger District. That goal was

consistent with the 1981 report on strategies of “managing for old-growth forests

16 Interview with Mike Kerrick, 17-18.

17 Interview with IBP group, 23.

18 Interview with Franklin, 22-23; interview with IBP group, 24.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

227

and attributes.” The group embraced its responsibility to directly address management issues, and the science leadership presented the Andrews Forest as a venue

for communicating that mission to a wider audience.

The group’s perception of Caswell’s departure as an opportunity, rather than

a crisis, illustrates the emerging self-confidence of the science leadership at the

Andrews in the early 1980s. Rather than responding to management inquiries or

seeking ways to interest forest managers in their work, science leaders asserted

their relevance to an internal personnel decision of the Willamette National Forest.

In doing so, they stepped beyond the sketchy boundaries laid down in previous

memorandums of understanding between PNW Station, OSU, and the Willamette

National Forest. The fact that they perceived their efforts to influence Kerrick’s

decision on this hire as successful, however, was as much a measure of Kerrick’s

evolving management style as it was a testimony to the brash self-confidence of

Figure 44—Kerrick’s recruitment of Steve Eubanks as district ranger at Blue

River transformed science-management relations at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest into full-blown managerial enthusiasm for experimental forestry.

Here, Dave Alexander, Steve Eubanks (crouching), Rolf Anderson, and Jerry

Mason confer at the McKenzie Bridge campground during a meeting of staff

from the Willamette National Forest and the Umpqua National Forest on

18 July 1986.

Gerald Williams
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

228

the Andrews group. During his interview with Steve Eubanks, who eventually won

the job, Kerrick never specifically indicated that good relations with research was

a management goal for the district ranger at Blue River. Instead, he asked Eubanks,

“How do you feel about working with research folk?” Eubanks, who had been

working with research in his previous assignments, responded that he considered

it “a real unique opportunity.” From Kerrick’s perspective, the budding partnership

with the group at the Andrews Forest was an “incredible resource” and his priority

was to avoid doing anything that would “negatively affect it.” Instead, he wanted

to “nurture it and see it grow.” In the end, Kerrick concluded, Eubanks “probably

spent more energy and effort on the Andrews than ... I wanted,” but he could see

“great things happening” as the partnership with research “really flowered under

his administration.”19

Kerrick assigned the new district ranger responsibility for nurturing the liaison

with research, and he included that responsibility as a management goal for that

person. For Kerrick, that directive was a simple extension of the traditional priorities of the Forest Service. Forest managers, he explained, constantly look for

“useful stuff” that will “help manage the forest better.” In his view, people, rather

than ideas, most commonly interfered with that goal, and he favored a strategy of

selecting people who could “hang out and work ... with the research community”

while also fulfilling their responsibilities as a district ranger.20 The person he selected to fill that niche at Blue River brought a level of management energy and

enthusiasm that few scientists at the Andrews Forest had noted in his predecessors. They nicknamed Eubanks “The Research Ranger on the Research Ranger

District” because he demonstrated a real enthusiasm for research by applying it in

his district. People in the group considered Eubanks a “major participant in the

research program” who did more than just support their efforts: he actually made

proposals and suggestions, sometimes disconcerting scientists who casually tossed

around ideas without concern for their practical implications. Eubanks, however,

took each suggestion seriously, and in Sedell’s words, “ran it back at us” with a

critique of its feasibility. He was also aggressive in implementing new practices on

the ground to demonstrate the management implications of ecosystem research,

particularly in relation to alternative silvicultural practices.21

19 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 10; interview with Mike Kerrick, 17-18; interview with

Jerry Franklin, 23; interview with IBP group.

20 Andrews group interview 22 September 1997, 35.

21 Interview with Mike Kerrick, 17-18; interview with Jerry Franklin, 23; interview with

Jim Sedell, 8; communication from Fred Swanson 3 January 1999.

They nicknamed

Eubanks “The

Research Ranger”

because he demonstrated a real enthusiasm for research

by applying it in his

district.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

229

Linking Personal and Professional Priorities With Experimental

Forestry on the Andrews

The person Kerrick selected to replace Caswell as district ranger at Blue River had

professional and personal roots deeply embedded in the old-growth forests of

Oregon. Like Silen and Franklin, Eubanks was a native of the Pacific Northwest.

He was born and raised near Salem, Oregon, where he grew up hunting and fishing

in nearby Douglas-fir forests. His career path to forestry was less a conscious decision than a predictable outcome, given his childhood experiences, peer group, and

proximity to OSU. He grew up in the latter years of the postwar timber boom in

western Oregon, when many Willamette Valley high schools still offered programs

designed to prepare graduates for entry-level jobs in the timber industry. Eubanks

recalls of his own career plans during that period, “I didn’t really have a vision of

what I wanted to do, but I ended up in forestry.” When an OSU recruiter visited

Eubanks’ high school to talk about careers in forest engineering, Eubanks thought

it sounded like “a pretty neat deal” although he “didn’t know diddly-squat about

forestry at that point.” With a similar degree of introspection, he stumbled into the

forestry program and eventually graduated from OSU in 1970 with a degree in

forest engineering.22

When Eubanks decided to seek a career in the Forest Service, his fellow

graduates questioned the move. By the time he completed his degree, the forestry

community was more polarized than in Silen’s era, and many of his classmates

urged him to pursue a career in private industry. As a recent product of the state’s

leading forestry education program, he was thoroughly steeped in that school’s

traditional emphasis on applied research. Eubanks, however, worked for the Forest

Service each summer of his college career, and he considered the agency a possible

career path. His Forest Service co-workers impressed him with their commitment

to principled forestry. Upon graduation in 1970, Eubanks landed a permanent position in the forest supervisor’s office of the Mount Hood National Forest, headquartered in Portland, Oregon. It was an auspicious year that included the first Earth

Day celebration and related initiatives that expanded the mission and focus of the

modern Forest Service well beyond production forestry. In Portland, he rubbed

shoulders with a new cadre of scientists who, like Eubanks, found a home in the

Forest Service of that era, and he learned to appreciate “the nonforestry specialists

22 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 1.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

230

as well as the forestry—such as the hydrologist, the fish biologist, the wildlife biologist, and ... the landscape architects.” From them, he learned “how to do things”

in an environmentally sensitive way.23 In that decade, from Eubanks’ perspective,

he and other forest professionals in the management branch of the Forest Service

sought appropriate responses to an increasingly complex array of issues: “That sort

of stuff [ecosystem thinking] just made sense. ... we weren’t butting heads with

anybody. I mean, we were bringing folks along with us as we went ... it just sort

of made sense.”24

Eubanks indirectly linked up with the Andrews community after he transferred

from the Mount Hood to the Wenatchee National Forest in east-central Washington.

Two years after that transfer, in 1977, some technicians who worked with

Eubanks in his new position attended a workshop in Wenatchee, where they encountered Chris Maser, an invited speaker and ecologist. Maser was then working

for the Bureau of Land Management in eastern Oregon and he participated in the

Wind River meeting on old growth the next year. In 1977, the Wenatchee office

was struggling with a management plan for a small drainage on the Wenatchee

National Forest. Eubanks learned about Maser from the technicians who were

“very impressed with Chris [Maser] and what he had to say as sort of nontraditional viewpoints of managing the forest ecosystem.” When the supervisor’s office

later assembled a team to plan precommercial thinning and harvesting in that basin,

they included Maser as an outside consultant. Maser spent a week on the district

with the forest silviculturist, the district silviculturist, and the forest soil scientists.

“Really, at that point,” Eubanks notes, “things just clicked ... we were just sort of

on the same wave length. That was the beginning of a long-term friendship with

Chris that ... influenced a lot of my thinking. We came up with some very nontraditional approaches on how to handle everything from coarse woody debris to ...

what kind of harvests that we were gonna do.”25

By the time Maser brought his interagency vision of management alternatives

to the attention of people in the Wenatchee National Forest supervisor’s office in

1977, he was already serving with Sedell and eight other scientists on the H.J.

23 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 1.

24 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 2.

25 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 2.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

231

Andrews National Advisory Committee.26 That committee helped the group plan

its campaign to secure additional NSF funding, beginning with the initial facilities

grant (or Experimental Ecological Research [EER]) and eventually resulting in the

first Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) grant. Among other responsibilities,

the advisory committee suggested strategies for attracting scientists from outside

the region and for evaluating whether the permanent facilities for research at the

Andrews Forest met the group’s needs. They also considered how to increase

funding from the NSF, manage data, and devise a management plan with zoning

restrictions to protect the research resource. Committee members, who met at the

Log Cabin Inn at McKenzie Bridge that year, toured, among other sites, the largestream monitoring and stream research programs on Mack Creek, the tree canopy

research program, and the erosion and geomorphology studies on Lookout Creek.27

The linkage of Eubanks, Maser, and the advisory committee in 1977 is just one

example of how events beyond the Andrews Forest linked the group with its past

and future priorities. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, that experimental forest emerged as a center for studying old-growth forests and planning management

strategies that integrated scientific research with public mandates. In that period,

the group transcended the Andrews Forest by linking experimental theory with

management needs on the Blue River District of the Willamette National Forest,

and that link between science and practice enhanced their national reputation. As

a result, the group was well positioned to respond when the old-growth debate exploded into the open. Eubanks was a primary, but not unique agent of the pairing

of management and research interests at the Andrews Forest. His case illustrates

how the group informally recruited and cooperatively engaged other scientists

and managers involved with similar issues in the Pacific Northwest in that period.

When Eubanks returned to Oregon from Wenatchee to become district ranger

for the Bear Springs District of the Mount Hood National Forest in the late 1970s,

he reinforced his previously indirect links with the Andrews group. He arrived to

26 Committee members included: Daniel Botkin (Marine Biology Laboratory, Woods

Hole, MA), Dale Cole (UW College of Forest Resources), Stanley Cook (UO Biology),

Dak Crossley (U Georgia Entomology), Richard Janda (USGS, Menlo Park,

Geomorphology and Hydrology), George Lauff (W.K. Kellogg Biology Station, Hickory

Corners, MI), Jack Major (UC Davis Botany), Chris Maser (BLM Range and Wildlife

Habitat Laboratory, La Grande), Robert Pierce (USFS Durham, NH, FSL), James Sedell

(OSU Fisheries and Wildlife). Memo (31 August 1977) from Jerry F. Franklin, Chief

Plant Ecologist to H.J. Andrews National Advisory Committee re: arrangements for

September meeting. Research Office Records (RG 170) Accession 91:1, reel 1, folders

29-30, Oregon State University Archives; interview with IBP group, 27.

27 Andrews History Project Workshop of 7 August 1996, 11; memo (31 August 1977)

from Jerry F. Franklin.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

232

find his new district still relying on traditional methods, including “a lot of clean up

of slash.” Eubanks arranged a meeting of his Bear Springs staff with Maser and

some of his close associates, including Jim Trappe, the mycologist with PNW

Station whose work included some collaboration with the Andrews group at the

Corvallis Laboratory. Trappe and Maser also collaborated on several studies in

the Andrews Forest during this period, culminating in a jointly edited compilation

entitled, The Seen and Unseen World of the Fallen Tree.

28 Maser and Trappe

worked with Eubanks and his staff at Bear Springs into the early 1980s as they

devised guidelines for slash treatment on the district. As a result of those efforts,

the Bear Springs District implemented some of Eubanks’ “nontraditional” approaches, leaving more coarse woody debris and more reserve trees.29

By the early 1980s, public support for innovative strategies of forest management was directly evident. Eubanks is just one example of how even traditional

graduates of production-oriented programs of forest engineering were receptive

to relatively new ideas, including those linked with the Andrews. Eubanks and his

colleagues at the Bear Springs District “took a certain amount of heat” from other

staff officers on the Mount Hood National Forest, but they also earned “kudos for

the things we were doing in nontraditional ways.” Despite criticism from some

quarters, in fact, these efforts to implement innovative ideas of ecosystem management earned the Bear Springs District an award from the Pacific Northwest

Region as “District of the Year” for several years running. In recruiting Eubanks

for a transfer from his GS-12 position as district ranger at Bear Springs to his

GS-13 appointment as district ranger at Blue River,30 Kerrick hired an experienced

administrator with proven success in implementing new ideas in ways appropriate

to the specific concerns of his district. Eubanks was also, however, a forest manager firmly rooted in the standards of forestry as traditionally practiced in western

Oregon. His success at the Bear Springs District demonstrated that “nontraditional”

ideas appealed to people whose personal origins and professional roles were rooted

in the mainstream of traditional, production-oriented forestry. In 1984, he brought

that ingredient of common appeal home to the Andrews Forest.

28 Chris Maser and James M. Trappe, tech. eds., The Seen and Unseen World of the

Fallen Tree (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific

Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-164, 1984).

29 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 2.

30 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 2, 4.

Eubanks demonstrated that “nontraditional” ideas

appealed to people

rooted in the mainstream of traditional,

production-oriented

forestry.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

233

Implementing Old-Growth Theory on the Blue River District,

1983–1989

Scientists with the Andrews group gained an enlarged arena for experimental

forestry with the arrival of Eubanks at Blue River in 1984. He joined the core

community after a 5-year period of progressive involvement with people more

peripheral to the group’s efforts at the Andrews Forest. He arrived in an era when

the core leadership of the group was becoming more assertive about the management implications of their research. The surrounding district, however, remained

largely unaffected by their efforts before Eubanks took over as district ranger. With

some exceptions, he was surprised to discover that cooperation between district

staff and researchers was mostly limited to the Andrews Forest itself. The Blue

River District had implemented relatively few nontraditional strategies beyond the

Lookout Creek drainage. On his first tour of the Blue River District, Eubanks drove

around with some of his staff to survey harvesting yields and management strategies on the district. He observed “basically traditional” clearcuts, with “no wildlife

trees,” and he mentioned to one of his companions, “You know, I’m not used to

that.” Management strategies that Eubanks had implemented at Bear Springs called

for leaving a substantial number of green, tall trees, and standing dead trees on

logged units. In response to that observation, Eubanks recalls, one of the assistant

district rangers at Blue River responded, “Well, geez, the Forest Supervisor

[Kerrick] was out one time, and we were looking at the unit where we had a

couple of wildlife trees left and he made the comment that the only good wildlife

tree is one that is going down the road on a truck.” Eubanks concludes, “I sort of

filed that one away.”31

Whether his new subordinates were attempting to avoid a confrontation with

their new boss by shifting upstairs the responsibility for a perceived failing, or

whether Kerrick really had made that comment, it was a rude awakening to the

realities of forest management on the Blue River District. Eubanks professes he

“had a lot of respect for Mike [Kerrick] as Forest Supervisor,” and he concedes

Kerrick “gave us lots and lots of freedom,” but he also understands that Kerrick

“had a certain amount of discomfort” with the ideas and innovations Eubanks

brought to his work on the Blue River District. The important point, however,

was that Eubanks found Kerrick willing to consider new ideas and to change his

mind and introduce new policies in cases where there was “better information.”32

31 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 11.

32 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 11.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

234

As management plans for the Blue River Ranger District began to include ideas

that originated with studies at the Andrews Forest, the group’s ideas about old

growth and ecosystem productivity began to change. The starting point for the

group’s evolving ideas about old-growth forests and ecological interactions during

the 1980s was the 1981 publication, Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth

Douglas-Fir Forests.

33 That report identified old-growth Douglas-fir—western

hemlock forests, ranging from 350 to 750 years old, as the primary example of

old-growth ecosystems in western Oregon and Washington. It stressed, however,

that in the strict sense, they are “generally not climax forests” because on most

sites, Douglas-fir is “subject to replacement by western hemlock and other more

[shade] tolerant associates.” The concept of an apparently ancient forest in a

sustained stage of dynamic transition was central to the initial synthesis of ideas

33 Jerry F. Franklin, Kermit Cromack, Jr., William Denison, [and others], “Ecological

Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests” (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of

Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station,

Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-118, 1981).

Figure 45—Although the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest gained a reputation during the 1990s

for its contributions to studies of old-growth conditions, the comparative watersheds approach

of earlier studies also left a legacy of extensive, second-growth stands. These photographs taken

by Dick Fredriksen and Al Levno over a period of 15 years, show conditions on the lower logged

unit on Watershed 3 in the 1st, 7th, 13th, and 16th summers after the 1964 flood (1965-1980).
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

235

about old growth in the early 1980s. The report framed specific attributes of old

growth as a comparison between “natural” and “managed” stands, and as a contrast between “old growth” and “second growth.” A cautionary note explained

that managed stands of second growth differed, qualitatively, from natural stands

of second growth, notably in terms of the continuity, or legacy, of woody debris

through severe disturbance. Young, natural stands tended to have significant

amounts of woody debris, but intensively managed stands of any age did not.

Variation, according to the report, was the most important constant in old-growth

forests. The publication cited variation—in size, spatial distribution, species, color,

texture, lighting, and undergrowth—as a central feature of old-growth forests, with

numerous logs of various sizes and stages of decay littering the forest floor, and

with relatively few evident signs of wildlife present. These attributes of old growth,

the authors noted, were clearly evident in small- to moderate-size streams flowing

through old growth, where organic debris (ranging in scale from logs to leaves,

needles, twigs, and bud scales) was a primary component of variation. Large-scale

elements were also central features of old growth: live old-growth trees, standing

dead trees, logs on land, and logs in streams. These prominent elements were also

functional components of the forest, with distinct roles as habitat and in terms of

nutrient cycling. The report inverted contemporary logging literature by asserting,

“The most sterile successional stage, in diversity of both plant and animal species,

is a dense, rapidly growing young conifer forest.”34

The group’s 1981 publication emphasized areas of uncertainty and the need

for further studies, but it also noted, “many species find optimum habitat in oldgrowth forests and some probably require old-growth habitat for survival.” The

report linked these concepts to mechanisms of primary production, energy flow,

conservation and cycling of nutrients, and regulation of waterflow in old-growth

forests. The authors also countered arguments that primary production necessarily

34 Franklin, Cromack, Denison, [and others], “Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth,”

1-4; communication from Fred Swanson 3 January 1999. Similar themes were further

developed in Thomas A. Spies and Jerry F. Franklin, “The Structure of Natural Young,

Mature, and Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests in Oregon and Washington.” In: Leonard F.

Ruggiero, Keith B. Aubry, Andrew B. Carey, Mark H. Huff, tech. eds., Wildlife and

Vegetation of Unmanaged Douglas-Fir Forests (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of

Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNWGTR-285, 1991), 91-109; and A.J. Hansen, T.A. Spies, F.J. Swanson, and J.L. Ohmann,

“Conserving Biodiversity in Managed Forests” BioScience 41 (1991)6: 382-392.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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declined in old-growth stands, emphasizing that the multilayered canopy of an oldgrowth forest was well suited to “efficient capture of energy” and that photosynthetic production “is generally large and intact in an old-growth forest.”35

The early emphasis on watershed studies at the Andrews Forest and the more

recently developed concepts of a river continuum and forest-stream interactions

were particularly evident in the group’s 1981 report. It identified streams as integral

components of old-growth conditions and suggested they were a reservoir of

organic matter and a locale for processes in old-growth forests, rather than simple

conduits for exporting debris from the ecosystem. Bacteria, fungi, insects, and

other organisms processed organic matter in forest streams, and a large proportion

of the basic food resource derived from wood in small streams under old-growth

trees. Coarse, woody debris in smaller streams was a major source of nitrogen

fixed in those systems. The influence of the forest, however, diminished with the

increasing scale of the stream, according to this synthesis of previous research,

while the kinds, numbers, and biomass of organisms increased with the scale of the

stream.36

The ideas expressed in the group’s 1981 synthesis are a freeze-frame view of

the thinking of the Andrews group on the subject of old growth and forest-stream

interactions at the end of the 1970s. Like the dynamic forests they describe, however, those ideas were in a state of sustained transition when PNW Station published that synthesis as a General Technical Report. The synthesis was based on

monitoring and research activities spanning more than three decades, and those

efforts continued through the next two decades, with different people, insights,

and methods added into the mix. The who participated in that process at the

Andrews Forest seldom can point to any specific “eureka” experience that revolutionized their thinking, just as Eubanks has a hard time identifying any specific

event that revolutionized his thinking about acceptable forest management practices. Scientists with the Andrews group, moreover, seldom considered their

research a viable model for revolutionizing management practices. Instead, they

tended to answer questions with more questions, and they sought venues for

exploring issues as they arose and evolved through time. Opportunities for such

explorations dramatically expanded when Eubanks joined the group. His willingness

35 Franklin, Cromack, Denison, [and others], Ecological Characteristics of

Old-Growth, 5.

36 Franklin, Cromack, Denison, [and others], Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth,

9-13.

Scientists at the

Andrews Forest

seldom can point

to any specific

“eureka” experience that revolutionized their

thinking.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

237

to reconsider what made sense in the manager’s world of applied forestry pushed

the group to reconsider what made sense in the realm of ideas about forest ecosystems. He was, however, a contributing factor, not a determining factor in the

evolution of the group.37

Minutes taken at the monthly meetings of the Andrews group collectively

provide a record of a scientific community in transition during the 1980s. Individually, the minutes from any particular meeting outline the central concerns of that

community at a given moment, much as the 1981 synthesis provides a rough

outline of the group’s thinking on the issue of old growth at that historic moment.

It was a group held together by dynamic engagement with ideas and people, and

they were consistently pulled in many different directions at any given time. The

LTER meeting of 12 October 1984, for example, introduced new District Ranger

Steve Eubanks to the 23 other people in attendance that day and to many others

who later read the meeting notes. Other items on the agenda included a discussion

of the Renewal Proposal (requesting $233,981), strategic planning for LTER II,

and the results of a visit to the Andrews Forest by Deputy Regional Forester John

Butruille and Johns Hopkins University Professor Gordon “Reds” Wolman in their

new roles as members of the LTER National Committee. In the area of data management, the group was informed of efforts to improve the performance of the

biomass [software] package to make it more user-friendly, they were warned of

the need to develop a 5-year strategy for meeting data management needs, and

they learned that students were doing data entry in an effort to cut costs. The H.J.

Andrews Data Management Group was also planning to attend a symposium at the

University of South Carolina that would include representatives from all 11 LTER

sites. Along similar lines of intersite coordination, Andrews’ site director Art McKee

was planning to exchange places with his counterpart from Hubbard Brook for

winter 1986. The Andrews group was also informed that funding for building improvements at the headquarters site was running out, even as interest in the site for

summer short courses was exceeding capacity. Four people were employed by the

“Central Lab” with LTER funds at an annual cost of $40,000, but people from

seven different agencies were listed as the “main users” of that facility. Efforts to

communicate the group’s ideas in separate syntheses of work on woody debris,

on ecosystem volume, and on ecosystem response and recovery at Mount St.

Helens were proceeding “painfully,” or were awaiting sabbatical opportunities so

37 Interview with Al Levno, 8-9.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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that someone could devote more time to those tasks. One timber sale (the “Vanilla

Leaf sale”) was underway, and two others were delayed for a year. Additional

concerns at that meeting included an insect proposal to examine the effects of log

structure on heterotrophic activity and the effects of invertebrate populations on

decomposition processes. The group was introduced to Shigeo Kobayashi, a

visiting scientist from the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in

Tsukuba, Japan, who worked at Mount St. Helens and the Andrews Forest, and

they learned of problems with protecting research sites at Mount St. Helens.38

The above listing of abbreviated discussion points from a typical meeting in

1984 imperfectly illustrates the mushrooming concerns of the Andrews group

during the mid 1980s. The 23 people who attended and discussed these issues contributed hours of their time and energy to the meeting. The printed record, however, summarizes what actually ensued in less than three pages. Attendance itself

is also an imperfect indicator of participation in the group. A memo dated 17

November 1983, from Franklin to the “H.J. Andrews Local Site Committee and

Associated Interested Parties,” for example, was addressed to the attention of 36

different people. Minutes from the 28 October 1983 meeting were attached to the

memo. Subsequent minutes indicated only about 16 people actually attended the

meeting that memo was intended to announce.39 Those who attended meetings of

the group, moreover, often did so on a casual basis, leaving and sometimes returning to rejoin the gathering or arriving late from other engagements, while business

continued in their absence. The meetings operated on a consensus model, usually

with a senior collaborator setting the agenda and facilitating the discussion, but

often deferring to scientists who were directly engaged in a particular project when

the meeting reached that point in the agenda. It was a fluid, free-flowing format

that operated within a minimalist executive framework while encouraging group

38 Those in attendance at this meeting included Fred Swanson, Kermit Cromack, Steve

Eubanks, Dave Perry, Tim Schowalter, Mark Harmon, Nick Aumen, Joe Means, Paul

Alaback, Susan Stafford, Al Levno, Stan Gregory, Dick Waring, Logan Norris, Gary

Lamberti, Judy Brenneman, Mark Klopsch, Jack Lattin, Phil Sollins, Rolfe Anderson,

Ken Cummins, Don Boelter, Greg Creole, and Jerry Franklin. H.J. Andrews LTER

meeting minutes (12 October 1984).

39 Those included on this list of “Associated Interested Parties” included Jim Sedell, Paul

Alaback, Art McKee, Dave Perry, Greg Koerper, Fred Swanson, George Bengston,

Kermit Cromack, Bill Emmingham, Susan Stafford, Jack Lattin, George Keller, Dennis

Harr, Tom Spies, Tom Callahan, Don Boelter, Jim Caswell, Phil Sollins, Mark Klopsch,

Mike Gallegly, Jim Hall, Al Levno, Kenneth Cummins, Dick Waring, Bob Tarrant, Stan

Gregory, Rolfe Anderson, George Carroll, Tim Schowalter, Peggy Reilly, Karen Luchessa,

Mark Harmon, Vince Puleo, Debra Coffey-Flexner, Adelaida Chaverri, and Karen

Waddell. LTER meeting minutes (2 December 1983)
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

239

discussion, debate, and consensus-based problem-solving that drew on all the

expertise and human resources in the room at that particular time. The monthly

meeting was a touchstone event reflecting, but not embodying, personal sacrifice

and commitment to the group. It was also a structured, but flexible opportunity for

communication and coordination, but it was not the defining event of the Andrews

community. Working relations were initiated and developed beyond the meeting

room, and they required active engagement in the issues, events, and people

working with specific programs of research at the Andrews Forest or other,

relevant sites.

By summer 1986, the group was grappling with problems of overcrowding

resulting from the proliferation of research projects at the Andrews Forest. Concerned that new projects might compromise the integrity of ongoing field studies,

some members of the group drafted a protocol for securing approval of research

in the experimental forest. They then circulated that protocol to the rest of the

group at the meeting of 21 February 1986. The protocol charged the site director

with maintaining a registry of projects, and it required scientists to provide the

site director with brief preproposals or research descriptions in advance of actual

work. The site director would then present these preproposals at the monthly

meeting and notify researchers whose studies might be affected by the proposed

work. All studies requiring manipulations exceeding 12.5 acres would also be submitted to the National Advisory Committee for review and approval. All projects

approved by the Local Site Committee would be signed, dated, and filed at the

Andrews Forest, the Blue River District, and the Corvallis Forestry Sciences

Laboratory. At that point, the research project and location would be entered into

the Land Base Inventory for the Andrews Forest.40

One obvious solution to the problem of competing pressures on the experimental forest itself was to move beyond the limits of that piece of real estate. The

nearby districts of the Willamette National Forest, particularly Blue River, were

obvious candidates for such an expansion. Eubanks was a regular participant in

the monthly meetings of the group, beginning in 1984, and that venue became a

setting for exploring possible links between scientific theory and forest policy. By

mid decade, Eubanks began to take the ideas presented at the monthly meetings and

develop strategies for implementing them on the Blue River Ranger District. He also

returned to those meetings with feedback and concerns that challenged previous

thinking in the group. In managing for old-growth characteristics, for example, he

40 LTER meeting minutes (21 February 1986).

One obvious solution to the problem

of competing pressures on the experimental forest was to

move beyond the

limits of that piece

of real estate.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

240

provided the research community with newly drafted guidelines the district had

adopted for managing large woody material on intensively managed sites. As

background, he cited a 2-year-old report by Maser and Trappe.41 Those guidelines

noted concerns about long-term site productivity and recent evidence suggesting

that productivity may decrease over time at high rates of use. He also announced

that the district had convened an “interdisciplinary team” to develop a strategy

applying “recent research findings” to ensure the long-term productivity of timber

in managed stands.42

Long-Term Site Productivity, Problems of Scale, and Coordination

of Effort

The decision to incorporate research ideas about long-term productivity into guidelines for managing woody debris at the Blue River District had broad implications

for the group. Dave Perry and Phil Sollins led an effort to develop a long-term site

productivity project at the Andrews Forest as part of the LTER. Minutes of the

group’s monthly meetings from the mid to late 1980s, however, suggest that those

efforts stalled and sputtered amid a flurry of personnel changes in that period. In

addition to Franklin’s sabbatical and eventual move to the University of Washington, Art McKee left on an exchange to Hubbard Brook during the latter half of the

decade. Then, amidst planning efforts on the long-term site productivity project,

Sollins accepted a 2-year appointment at Yale in June 1987. His responsibilities for

the project shifted to Perry and Mary Leuking, a recent postdoc from the University of California Riverside hired to run Sollins’ lab in his absence. Before the end

of 1988, Steve Eubanks announced he had accepted a position in Washington, DC,

and would leave the Andrews group by the end of January 1989. The next month,

Bernard Bormann, who previously had little involvement with the Andrews Forest

or group, moved to Corvallis to lead Forest Service research on long-term site

productivity. His arrival rejuvenated enthusiasm for the concept in subsequent

41 Chris Maser and James M. Trappe, The Seen and Unseen World of the Fallen Tree.

42 “District Resource Management Guidelines [28 July 1986]” in HJA Local Site

Committee meeting minutes (19 September 1986).
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

241

meetings, and the group learned that his research unit planned to locate two study

sites on and adjacent to one of the reference stands that year. By December of the

next year, Mike Kerrick had also announced his retirement.43

The high degree of turnover forced the group into a leadership transition related to its search for a defining research focus. Among other concerns, the group

needed to strengthen its proposal for continuing LTER funding. Harmon, whose

log-decomposition study was a frequent topic of discussion at the monthly meetings, emerged as a leading figure in that effort. He and others in the group struggled

with the idea of adding more projects to the LTER proposal. Harmon’s log study

remained a centerpiece of the proposal, but they wanted to avoid tying their fate

to any particular project, however long term. That concern led them to the decision

to look at long-term site productivity as a possible addition that would begin late

in LTER 2. The group was less clear on who should lead the project because it

included many different disciplines. Harmon notes the confusion over leadership

was compounded by a sense of overload on major projects. As one example, the

group had an “endless debate” about a proposal Franklin termed “the Phoenix

Project.” Franklin’s concept was to do something “big and bold and exciting,” and

he came up with the idea of setting the torch to a patch of forest (about 100 acres)

so the group could study the effects of a catastrophic fire in old growth. Despite

some initial “prework” and lengthy discussions, Harmon observes, that “neat idea”

never crystallized into a viable proposal because it was “a bit more complex than

anybody could quite take on” and the group “could never get consensus on a

central idea, theme, or anything.”44

Eubanks added a jolt of managerial reality to the theoretical focus of the group

as they pondered the idea of torching off a large area of old growth in the tense

political atmosphere of the late 1980s. That proposal was one of the more dramatic

examples of Eubanks’ dual role as enthusiastic participant in the group and as a

seasoned Forest Service administrator. From his perspective, the idea was to simulate a natural disturbance regime. They would select a large patch of old growth,

intensively monitor and document the site, and then deliberately set it on fire during the summer to simulate the same conditions that would lead to a natural fire.

43 HJA Local Site Committee meeting minutes (9 May 1986, 17 October 1986, 10 April

1987, 5 June 1987, 14 October 1988, 6 January 1989, 17 February 1989, 10 March

1989, 14 December 1990). See also, the records retained in the “Long-Term Site

Productivity Folder, 1984-1987” H.J. Andrews Files, File Box B, Storage Vault, FSL,

Corvallis, OR.

44 Interview with Mark Harmon, 18.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

242

Eubanks’ recollection of the proposal conveys a mixture of professional curiosity

and pragmatic disbelief: “Now that was an interesting discussion because what we

were talking about was going to be very complicated and very expensive. I mean,

you don’t torch off a 70- or 80-acre ... stand of old growth in the summer time

without a lot of implications. You know, that is right during [the period of high] fire

danger.” From a research perspective, however, a burn scheduled during the winter

would not duplicate natural conditions, and it would not burn as hot as a summer

fire with dry fuel. The study needed a high-intensity fire that would “crown out,”

and that was simply not acceptable, from a management standpoint, during the

summer period of high risk for fires elsewhere in the national forest. Despite the

technical hurdles and potential for disastrous public relations, however, Eubanks

seriously considered the proposal. District staff drew up a burn plan for a candidate area, and studied the implications relevant to that particular site, mapping out

the potential for spot fires up to 2 miles away, among other concerns. The proposal

ultimately died in the planning stages, but Eubanks considered the study meritorious

from a management standpoint because “premonitoring” the site would have provided “more qualitative information” than relying only on postmonitoring an area

burned in a wildfire. The proposal, however, simply failed the acid test of enthusiasm in the group: it lacked sustained sponsorship or sufficient interest in that community. When Franklin left for the University of Washington, the proposal lost its

strongest proponent.45

The Phoenix proposal raised important leadership issues that demonstrated an

emerging complexity and diffusion of authority within the Andrews group. Monumental projects took place in a political context that had to be factored into the

decision process: Did the risks outweigh the potential science and management

benefits? The Phoenix proposal was not without parallel. Scientists and forest

managers at other sites had plans to initiate catastrophic fires to study the effects

in various ecosystems, including the LTER research area near Fairbanks, Alaska.

Swanson observes that the group also proposed broader science questions relevant

to the proposed burn at the time they were considering the Phoenix idea: “Part of

the context was [the] nuclear winter debate and what gases and particulates are

emitted in a big fire and what are effects [in the] atmosphere.” Despite the scientific potential, however, Swanson questioned the wisdom of proceeding: “I felt it

would put too many eggs in a risky basket, and it would be a stand-scale study (or

45 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 20-21.

The Phoenix

proposal was not

without parallel.

Managers at other

sites had plans to

initiate catastrophic

fires to study the

effects in various

ecosystems.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

243

small watershed), and we needed to move on to a big landscape scale.” The issue

opened an internal debate within the group over the need to initiate a landscape

experiment. The group had planned such a study for the upper Blue River drainage

in 1988, but sidelined that project when the study area was designated as a habitat

conservation area for the northern spotted owl and, therefore, off-limits to manipulative experiments of this nature. The group nonetheless moved in the direction of

a landscape study at a different site that eventually became the Augusta Landscape

Plan. More than a decade later (January 1999), the group revisited the concept of

a landscape experiment in an expanded version, including the same area planned for

the 1988 study, that eventually became the Blue River Landscape Plan and Study.46

The apparent lack of support for the Phoenix Project in the group seems

paradoxical, given Franklin’s role in the conceptual development of the idea. The

group, however, had already moved toward a more diffuse process of decisionmaking, and Franklin was no longer a dominant leader. That transition was partly

a function of new personalities blending into the group, but it also demonstrated

the evolving community culture at the Andrews in the era of the LTER. The Forest

Service component of funding and other support remained critical to the survival

and identity of the group, but LTER funding introduced an element of flexibility that

subtly eroded previous lines of authority. People adapted, but they did so in ways

that were often indirect or submerged beneath a frenzy of distracting detail and

mushrooming responsibilities. The result was a vague, unarticulated sense that

things were slightly off-balance. Fred Swanson officially took over from Franklin

in 1986 as the PNW Station scientist in Corvallis responsible for leading Forest

Service Research at the Andrews Forest, but the more informal lines of authority

in the group could not be so summarily transferred. In addition to leadership concerns, an overload of responsibilities and a multitude of possibilities confronted the

group. The leadership of grant-funded scientists like Harmon and Warren Cohen,

for example, encouraged more carbon studies and landscape work, as opposed to

the more “monumental experiments” Franklin tended to favor. As the group moved

in other directions, Franklin concluded it was a good time for him to move on to

other things, trusting Swanson to continue his legacy of Forest Service leadership

at the Andrews.47

46 Communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999. J.H. Cissel, F.J. Swanson, P.J.

Weisberg, “Landscape Management Using Historical Fire Regimes: Blue River, Oregon,”

Ecological Applications (1999): 1217-1231.

47 Communication from Fred Swanson 2 January 1999; interview with Jerry Franklin, 21.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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Amid the distractions of this transition in community culture, the failed Phoenix

initiative simply dramatized chronic issues that also plagued the long-term siteproductivity project. Rather than the lack of interest and excessive risk that ultimately scotched the Phoenix initiative, the long-term site productivity project

suffered from too much input. It simply lacked focus. It was a “mish-mash” of so

many good ideas that, Harmon concluded, “just was not coalescing.” The effort to

secure NSF funding for the second round of the LTER, however, sharpened the

group’s focus, and in the process of working through their difficulties, the new

cohort of leaders clarified their thinking. It was really clear, they concluded, that

they could not keep adding on new “mega-projects” when they were having “real

problems” keeping their earlier blockbuster studies on track. Despite the crumbling

vision of long-term productivity as a centerpiece project for the group, that initiative did yield a compendium volume in 1989 addressing long-term productivity

issues relating to forest ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. This publication

solidified the group’s status as an obvious source for information about how to

sustain forest production while protecting old-growth habitat. It was particularly

important in the next decade, when the spotted owl issue placed a premium on

ideas about how to reconcile these issues. The project, however, was a disappointment when compared to its potential to provide a central focus for the group’s

divergent research. It came to an abrupt end when Perry suddenly declared the

project over, after an expenditure of about $350,000. The Forest Service subsequently revived the project and relocated it to the Isolation Block on the Willamette

National Forest south of the McKenzie River. Harmon, who cites Perry’s decision

as personally disappointing, concludes, “They frankly did a much better job with it

than we did. But it was a shame because when it started, it was a hot topic.”48

The group learned an important lesson from its inability to continue the longterm site productivity initiative. The pressure to secure large blocks of funding

spawned a tendency to think in blockbuster terms, but expanding the scale without

refining the focus imperiled the viability of the project and risked other damage to

the group. Human and financial resources were limited, and both were contingent

on demonstrable successes. Young scientists could not be expected to sacrifice

their careers on projects with no definable near-term output, and funding agencies

could not be expected to keep the money flowing to programs from which results

were not forthcoming. The site productivity study consumed many resources but

48 D.A Perry, R. Meurisse, B. Thomas, [and others], eds., “Maintaining the Long-Term

Productivity of Pacific Northwest Forest Ecosystems” (Portland, OR: Timber Press,

1989); interview with Mark Harmon, 18, 22.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

245

the group had very little to show for the money they had invested. They spent

about $30,000 a year to set up the tightly structured and narrowly focused logdecomposition study, but the long-term site productivity initiative consumed

$70,000 per year for upwards of 5 years without clarifying its direction or even

installing the study. The contrast was glaring, and Harmon concluded it was not

only “risky,” but “we can’t afford it.”49

External and internal pressures forced the group to invent new strategies during the 1980s, but they inherited a powerful legacy of research that blended detailed

focus and creative flexibility. Their collaborative efforts contributed to an evolving

set of ideas and strategies for understanding and managing forests and watersheds

that began to bear fruit during that decade. Studies involving the group and the

Andrews Forest, for example, were the basis for a 1988 publication that focused

on coarse woody debris in the old-growth forests, streams, rivers, estuaries, and

beaches of western Oregon.50 That publication included Franklin and Maser’s

ruminations on future options for public lands in the region. They emphasized the

need for a management philosophy built around the premise that biological diversity

must be maintained if forest management is to attain multiple-use objectives. They

also acknowledged that intensive forest management was intended to produce large

quantities of wood fiber in the shortest time possible. They warned, however,

that methods that reduced the complexity of biological systems might sacrifice

the potential for long-term productivity in those systems. They noted that management strategies for such biological simplification could be “economically disadvantageous,” and they proposed an alternative forest management strategy to maintain

long-term site productivity by promoting ecological diversity in the forest portion

of the ecosystem.

The “diversified management” option that Franklin and Maser proposed reformulated the group’s 1981 concept of a forest in sustained transition, but their

1988 publication placed more emphasis on management options. They called for

a strategy of temporal diversity, noting that intensive timber management typically

aims to eliminate three successional stages: grass-forb, mature, and old-growth.

They defined the mature stage as beginning at 80 to 100 years of age and persisting for about 100 years, and they argued old-growth conditions began emerging

49 Interview with Mark Harmon, 18, 21.

50 Jerry F. Franklin and Chris Maser, “Looking Ahead: Some Options for Public Lands.”

In: Chris Maser, Robert F. Tarrant, James M. Trappe, and Jerry F. Franklin, eds., From

the Forest to the Sea: a Story of Fallen Trees, 113-116.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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between 175 to 200 years of age. The management strategy they proposed emphasized the contribution of a diversified forest to the “stability, diversity, and productivity of the tributary aquatic portion of the ecosystem.” The young, closed-canopy

forest (less than 80 years) that intensive management strategies were designed to

promote, they argued, is the “least diverse stage of succession” and, in that stage,

the trees “mobilize all resources of the site.” They proposed mechanisms for

delaying, or otherwise manipulating the timing of canopy closure to mimic patch

conditions in other, “natural” successional stages. Perhaps most significantly, in

the context of the recommendations of the Thomas proposal on spotted owls that

followed 2 years after this publication, Franklin and Maser argued, in 1988, that

mature and old-growth stands could be maintained by “reserving existing stands

and creating new stands with long rotations.” It was both a call for action and a

formula requiring ongoing studies: “Diversified management accommodates change

and recognizes our limited knowledge of how forests function.” They emphasized

the need for “maintaining options” with an eye toward ensuring long-term productivity.51

Franklin and Maser’s recommendations stood on the foundation of previous

decades of work focusing on old growth and broader forest and watershed issues

at the Andrews Forest. Their recommendations also set the tone for implementing

old-growth and landscape studies and management priorities over the next decade.

Other sections of From the Forest to the Sea emphasized particular mechanisms

creating diversity in old-growth forests, including the importance of disturbance

from falling trees. These events, they observed, create openings in the canopy and

opportunities for new plants to become established; contribute organic matter and

habitat for microorganisms, plants, fungi, and animals; release nutrients to forest

soils; reduce erosion by forming barriers to downhill soil movement; and promote

nitrogen fixation by bacteria living in the wood, in addition to nitrogen from other

litter components such as leaves. Complex arrangement of fallen trees across the

forest floor, some on the ground and others suspended at various heights, creates

a complex matrix of shade, habitat, and cover, further promoting a diversity of

microhabitats and associated species. Progressive decomposition of logs adds

internal as well as external surface area, further enhancing the diversity and number

51 Franklin and Maser, “Looking Ahead: Some Options for Public Lands,” 113-116.

“Diversified management accommodates change and

recognizes our

limited knowledge

of how forests

function.”
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

247

of microclimates.52 Old-growth trees in riparian zones provide dense vegetative

canopies, contribute litter that delivers nutrients to the stream portion of the ecosystem, and eventually fall into streams and rivers, becoming large organic debris

that supports productive habitats for salmonid and other fish by stabilizing other

debris, anchoring pools, providing cover, and storing and releasing nutrients. Large,

stabilized logs also protect riparian sites where alder and other species can become

established. They promote vegetative growth that eventually stabilizes stream channels or restabilizes stream channels after floods. Woody debris in streams also

provides habitat for algae and microbes consumed by insects, and it provides substrate for aquatic invertebrates. Gradual decomposition of logs in streams releases

nutrients while providing habitat for nitrogen-fixing microorganisms.53 From the

perspective of the Andrews group, this publication helped clarify where they had

been, but they were less certain, heading into the 1990s, of exactly where they

were going.

Stepping out of the Fire and Into the Frying Pan of the 1990s

Just as the Andrews group struggled to find a focus and to adapt to a significant

transition of leadership and talent, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service clarified

matters in the broader arena of forestry conflicts with its April 1989 proposal to

list the northern spotted owl as a threatened species. Four federal agencies responsible for managing public lands in the owl’s range subsequently assembled an

interagency task force to develop a “scientifically credible” conservation strategy

for the northern spotted owl, and that group submitted its report in early 1990.54

That strategy defined a two-stage approach to the problem: first, protect existing

old-growth habitat in amounts and distribution that would “adequately ensure the

owl’s long-term survival” and second, seek ways to “produce and sustain suitable

52 Chris Maser, Stephen Cline, Kermit Cromack, Jr., James Trappe, and Everett Hansen,

“What We Know About Large Trees That Fall to the Forest Floor.” In: Chris Maser,

Robert F. Tarrant, James M. Trappe, and Jerry F. Franklin, eds., From the Forest to the

Sea: a Story of Fallen Trees (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest

Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-229, 1988),

25-45.

53 James R. Sedell, Peter A. Bisson, Frederick J. Swanson, and Stanley V. Gregory, “What

We Know About Trees That Fall Into Streams and Rivers.” In: Chris Maser, Robert F.

Tarrant, James M. Trappe, and Jerry F. Franklin, eds., From the Forest to the Sea: a

Story of Fallen Trees (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service,

Pacific Northwest Research Station, Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-229, 1988), 47-83.

54 Thomas, Forsman, Lint, and others, A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Spotted

Owl, (the Interagency Scientific Committee, or ISC report), 51-57; Dietrich, The Final

Forest, 72-85.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

248

owl habitat in managed forests.”55 The scope of the plan extended from northern

California to the Canadian border. It was a magnet for criticism. On the one hand,

timber interests complained it was an unfair expansion of regulatory control beyond

existing habitat conservation areas. Environmental groups, however, criticized the

proposal as a sellout that would open previously protected old-growth habitat for

future logging on the unproved premise that second-growth could be managed to

mimic old-growth characteristics and thus provide suitable habitat for the owl.

Both sides in the controversy questioned the proposal as a technocratic compromise that undervalued other concerns. Neither side, however, was willing to surrender the hallowed ground of scientific principle. Instead, the argument turned on

whether science could be, or already had been sufficiently integrated into management strategies.

Implementing the interagency strategy would have required close coordination

of management goals with state-of-the-art research relevant to old-growth forests.

By 1990, when the Thomas report appeared, the Andrews group was not only

modeling the concept of applied research on the Blue River District, they were

working on a book-length synthesis of their efforts. The synthesis volume idea

originated in the mid 1980s, and it continued through the end of the century. It had

reached the stage of chapter assignments and an outline by the time Franklin began

to prepare the group for a pulse planned for 8-16 June 1987 at Fraser Experimental

Forest in Colorado. The book effort sputtered, however, and the group managed

only a few, partial efforts before the end of the century. Eubanks wrote a publication describing the process of technology transfer at Blue River before he left in

1989, and Franklin issued his manifesto on New Forestry in a brief article that

appeared that same year. Swanson and Franklin also teamed up on a 1992 article

for Ecological Applications entitled “New forestry principles from ecosystem

analysis of Pacific Northwest forests.”56

The group directly addressed the conservation strategy for the spotted owl

in an extended discussion at their April 1990 meeting. That discussion centered on

55 Thomas, Forsman, Lint, and others, A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Spotted

Owl, 2.

56 Steve Eubanks, “Applied concepts of ecosystem management: developing guidelines

for coarse, woody debris.” In: Perry, D.A.; Meurisse, R.; Thomas, B.; [and others], eds.,

Maintaining the Long-Term Productivity of Pacific Northwest Forest Ecosystems

(Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1989), 230-236; Jerry Franklin, “Toward a New Forestry,”

American Forests (November/December 1989), 1-8. HJA Local Site Committee meeting

minutes (9 May 1986, 17 October 1986, 10 April 1987, 5 June 1987, 14 October 1988, 6

January 1989, 17 February 1989, 10 March 1989). J. Franklin and F. Swanson, “New

Forestry Principles From Ecosystem Analysis of Pacific Northwest Forests,” Ecological

Applications 2(1992): 262-274; “Book Stuff” Records, H.J. Andrews Files, File Box E,

Storage Vault, FSL, Corvallis, OR.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

249

the issue of “placing large tracts of partially clearcut land on a recovery path.” Only

15 people attended the meeting: Lynn Burditt, who had just replaced Steve Eubanks

as district ranger at Blue River; Cynthia Orlando; Tom Spies; Bill McComb; Art

McKee; Mark Harmon; Julia Jones; Jack Lattin; Dave Perry; Cindy McCain; Joe

Beatty; George Lienkaemper; Bob Griffiths; Linda Ashkenas; and Fred Swanson.

By comparison with the list of 36 prominent scientists Franklin had invited to a

similar meeting 7 years earlier, this session attracted a relatively small number of

long-term veterans mixed with more recent additions to the group. Together, they

concluded the owl recovery plan was a “natural extension of landscape studies we

are planning.” Provisions of the interagency proposal that attracted particular attention at the 1990 meeting included the strategy’s call for “testing of alternative

silvicultural practices that may provide some owl habitat and some cutting for

timber,” as well as other provisions for “creating more compositionally and structurally diverse stands in plantations previously destined for max[imum] Douglas-fir

wood fiber production.” With those goals in mind, the Andrews group planned their

strategy for the upcoming months: “We will be defining the landscape- and standlevel studies that arise from the owl report, keeping our eye on the ecosystem ball

and not being distracted by the present owl-emphasis.”57

The newly reconstituted Andrews group clearly perceived the owl crisis as an

opportunity to refocus public attention on underlying ecosystem processes in oldgrowth forests. Working from Franklin’s dictum to “look for something big to

do, and just do it,” the group also committed itself to ensuring that people did not

abandon the forest for the big trees. The rising tide of public sentiment surrounding the owl issue was an opportunity for recommitment to community principles

and action. It opened a window for promoting the Andrews vision in more public

venues. The broader context of the old-growth dispute also led to overblown

political rhetoric that seemed to invite a more public response from the scientific

community. In response to rising concerns about the buildup of greenhouse gases

and global warming, for example, Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski and others

urged the Forest Service to press forward with a program of intensive clearcutting

as a way to promote young forests that would allegedly store more carbon than

old-growth forests. Ongoing research at the Andrews Forest, however, suggested

that cutting old forests to make way for young stands would actually release more

57 LTER/HJA Local Site Committee meeting minutes (6 April 1990).

The Andrews group

perceived the owl

crisis as an opportunity to refocus

public attention on

underlying ecosystem processes in

old-growth forests.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

250

carbon into the atmosphere. Harmon, Franklin, and Ferrell responded to the political opening with a February 1990 article in Science, directly challenging, with

science, the argument that conversion of old-growth forests to young, fastgrowing stands would decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide. On the contrary, they

argued, it would take 200 years before regenerating stands would begin to approach the carbon-storage capacity of the previous old-growth stand. They also

issued a press release summarizing the arguments presented in that paper. Harmon

recalls, “Within days two things happened: The Forest Service disavowed any

knowledge of this proposed [accelerated logging] program, and they were searching on a way to get me fired. But I didn’t work for them.” Secondly, he notes,

Murkowski denied having made the claim. The Science article made the proposal a

political orphan. The group had previously advised Congress through agency

channels that the concept was mistaken, but in Harmon’s words, “they were not

listening.” The Science article, however, attracted newspaper coverage, and helped

avert the changes to Forest Service policy that Murkowski reportedly had wanted.58

58 Mark Harmon, William K. Ferrell, and Jerry Franklin, “Effects on Carbon Storage of

Conversion of Old-Growth Forests to Young Forests,” Science (9 February 1990), 699-

701; interview with Mark Harmon, 7.

Figure 46—The renewed focus on old-growth conditions amidst the controversies of

the early 1990s prompted congressionally funded developments at the H.J. Andrews

Experimental Forest, as seen in this view of the new administrative building. The office/

lab building contains administration offices, five small laboratories for processing field

samples, a computer room, and a small library. The Salt Salmon open-air pavilion is

used for group gatherings during mild weather.

Al Levno, 1995
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

251

The carbon-storage example illustrates the group’s higher public profile in the

1990s. During that decade, people in the group learned the political value of their

multiple lines of support. They could address complex and controversial issues in

public forums with less concern for political backlash, provided they could back it

up with good science. The group’s past success and increasingly public profile

also attracted more favorable Congressional attention. Lawmakers from the Pacific

Northwest scrambled to demonstrate their responsiveness to the concerns of constituents caught in the wrangle over old-growth forests in the region. The Andrews

Forest happened to be located in the heart of the old-growth controversy in the

western Oregon Cascades. More important, the group was already working with

forest managers on the Blue River Ranger District to implement ecosystem management and riparian guidelines for maintaining stream ecosystems as a management strategy. These circumstances made the Andrews Forest a logical field venue

for politicians seeking to learn about forest ecosystems and related concerns and to

demonstrate their relevance and engagement with the old-growth issue.

The group enjoyed strong support from the Oregon delegation to Congress,

particularly from Congressmen Les AuCoin and Peter DeFazio, as well as Senator

Mark Hatfield. That support yielded tangible benefits in the early 1990s. AuCoin

accompanied Congressman Chet Atkins, who chaired a House subcommittee

overseeing the Forest Service budget, along with other committee members and

staff, on a tour of the Andrews Forest in August 1989. During that visit, the group

spotlighted its ongoing research at the Andrews Forest in areas relating to New

Forestry, the spotted owl, landscape studies, and other issues. AuCoin returned for

a second visit in April 1990. During that visit, he expressed shock at the living conditions scientists endured at the Andrews while pursuing world-class programs of

research. AuCoin converted the affectionate nickname “Ghetto in the Meadow,” by

which scientists referred to the headquarters site, into a powerful political metaphor

that helped him win a major Congressional allocation to improve those facilities.

The following June, the group learned he was preparing a $1,000,000 request to

fund facilities improvements at the Andrews Forest headquarters site, including

several bunkhouses, office and laboratory facilities, and a meeting room. On 30

June 1990, DeFazio accompanied Congressman Bruce Vento (D-Minn.) and five

staffers to view research and forestry practices at the Andrews Forest and on the

Blue River Ranger District. That tour emphasized demonstrations of the researchmanagement partnership modeled there. In November 1990, people in the group

learned from AuCoin’s office that the $1,000,000 for facilities improvement at the

Andrews was appropriated in the FY1991 Forest Service budget. They proceeded
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

252

to organize a site development committee consisting of Art McKee, Jack Lattin,

John Cissel, Stan Gregory, Dick Suwaya, and Fred Swanson. In addition to the

new funds from the Congressional allocation, the Forest Service and the NSF provided ongoing support, notably including the NSF approval in 1990 for continuing

the Andrews LTER from 1991 through 1996. The LTER renewal began at $500,000

for the first year, and scaled up to $600,000 by the last year of that period. Within

a month after learning from AuCoin’s office that the $1 million allocation had been

appropriated for FY1991, the Dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State

University also awarded the Andrews Ecosystem group the College of Forestry

Dean’s Superior Achievement Award for 1990.59 The Congressional allocation

provided a major boost for capital improvements at the Andrews Forest, but it

also solidified the group’s standing with the three primary legs of its funding triad.

Everyone loved a success story.

Conclusion

By the early 1990s, the Andrews group had clearly moved into a new era, with a

refined mission and a reconstituted community that combined new faces and initiatives with continuing ideas and associates. The emphasis on characterizing old

growth during the previous decade gave way to a more concerted effort to coordinate research and management in an adaptive strategy for promoting long-term

productivity in old-growth forests. More broadly, the group emerged as a leading

venue for developing ecosystem management guidelines for national forest lands.

With this emerging prominence, they suddenly confronted the reality of unprecedented amounts of funding. That funding, however, came with higher expectations. Events largely beyond their control and away from the Andrews Forest

buffeted the group, but they kept their focus on fundamental issues rooted in

previous decades of research there. Old-growth forests continued as one central

theme among many other continuing threads of collaborative research, and people

in the group engaged new issues with more self-confidence. They adapted the

principle of sustained transition that Maser and Franklin outlined in From the

Forest to the Sea, and they applied it to their group, developing internal networks

of informal authority and communicating their ideas to a broader, public audience.

59 Minutes of LTER/HJA Local Site Committee Meeting (18 August 1989, 3 November

1989, 11 January 1990, 6 April 1990, 1 June 1990, 2 November 1990).
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

253

Chapter Seven: Mainstreaming the Andrews and

Transforming the Mainstream

The Andrews group focused on fundamental, underlying ecosystem processes

during the old-growth debates of the 1990s and promoted that outlook in public

forums. People in the group tried, however, to make their studies more directly

relevant to the public debate over management priorities. By the late 1990s, that

outlook helped make the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews Forest), and

the group associated with it, a model for how the Forest Service and other agencies might better integrate management and research activities on public lands. The

group constantly reinvented itself throughout the decade, and people in that community considered that pattern of sustained innovation one reason for their continued success. Unconsciously mimicking the dynamic nature of the ecosystems in

which they worked, these people struggled to reconcile the dynamic structure and

ideas of the Andrews Forest and group with the constantly evolving priorities of

public agencies and their policy mandates.

Major personnel changes forced the Andrews group to adapt and examine more

closely the ways in which scientists and managers collaborated on the Blue River

Ranger District during the 1990s. In many cases, the people who filled in for departing veterans had less personal experience at the Andrews Forest. The sudden

infusion of funds for new buildings and other infrastructure improvements at the

Andrews transformed the place into a more permanent, more urbanized setting that

helped recruit cooperators but also altered their initial perceptions of the experimental forest. Even Dyrness, who returned to the Andrews group early in the 1990s

after nearly two decades in Alaska, was surprised to discover that modern facilities

at the headquarters site had transformed it into a prominent center for community

interaction, including volleyball games and other recreational activities.1

The new cohort of researchers who joined the group on soft-money appointments during the 1990s supported a smaller core of people who continued in

leadership roles with more secure funding. By comparison with previous decades,

more people in the group were younger, with less secure tenure. The new buildings, infrastructure, and community activities at the headquarters site provided a

sense of permanence for this increasingly impermanent community. The group

still emphasized continuity with earlier efforts, but fewer people in the group had

1

 Interview with Ted Dyrness on 11 September 1996, 27-28.

Funds for new

buildings and

other infrastructure improvements

transformed the

place into a more

permanent, more

urbanized setting.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

254

firsthand experience in that previous work. At the same time, the group attracted

people from a broader array of backgrounds. More scientists joined the group

while working as employees of other, cooperating agencies, although the more

senior members of the group were more often Forest Service employees who

tended to stay with that agency for most of their careers. Those who came to the

group from the university community at Corvallis, by contrast, more commonly

were undergraduate or graduate students, or people just beginning their postgraduate careers. These more recently trained recruits contributed newly honed skills

in specialized fields to a group led by seasoned professionals. In the late 1990s,

Swanson characterized the resulting makeup of the group as “bi-modal, with a few

senior people, and a lot of really young [folks].”2

The Andrews group styled itself as a self-selecting community with a cooperative ethic, but it struggled to articulate a consistent vision for the 1990s. The

group’s self-image contrasted sharply with the more hierarchical structures and

bureaucratic traditions of the various state and federal agencies that supported its

work. Before the Andrews model of adaptive management could be implemented

in even one of those agencies, either the agency—or the model—had to change.

The group’s cooperative ethic originated with a set of virtually unexamined, shared

assumptions about historical origins of the Andrews community, and its successful

engagement with the Willamette National Forest rested on a similarly unexamined

foundation. People in the group spent much of the 1990s trying to explain the

Andrews model to people unfamiliar with the history of how that collaborative

community came to be. In the process, they began to examine more closely and

critically the way they functioned as a group.

One of the more important ways in which the Andrews model changed during

the 1990s involved members of the group who gravitated toward regional issues

that absorbed energy and diverted them from day-to-day activities at the experimental forest. Leaders of the group participated in efforts to integrate landscape

and regional perspectives into management plans and policies at regional, national,

and international scales, notably including the Northwest Forest Plan of 1996.

Swanson, for example, identified the watershed analysis component of the Northwest Forest Plan as “a medium for carrying some of that landscape thinking to

the land manager.” The concept, he noted, “came out of academic circles, merged

with Forest Service experience, and ... then moved on into policy, and [then it]

comes ripping back out to management.” Scientists affiliated with the group were

2

 Interview with small watersheds group, 21-22.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

255

also featured contributors to a major 1997 synthesis of the scientific principles

underpinning ecosystem management.3

 As a group, they tried to encourage a

cooperative linkage of ecosystems research with forest management policy.

Personal and Community Pathways to the Cooperative Ethic of

Adaptive Management

Scientists affiliated with the Andrews group during the 1990s looked beyond

old-growth forests to promote habitat restoration across a broad mosaic of ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. The stream team, for example, continued studies

rooted in their previous efforts at the Andrews Forest, but their research also

focused on densely populated and intensively managed areas adjoining other major

streams and rivers. They grappled with research questions that included social and

3

 Stan Gregory and Linda Ashkenas, Riparian Management Guide: Willamette National

Forest (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest

Region,1990); E. Thomas Tuchmann, Kent P. Connaughton, Lisa E. Freedman, and

Clarence B. Moriwaki, The Northwest Forest Plan: A Report to the President and

Congress (Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Forestry and

Economic Assistance, December 1996); and Kathryn A. Kohm and Jerry F. Franklin,

Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997); interview

with small watersheds group, 20.

Figure 47—Apartment facilities at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest headquarters compound. These new accommodations transformed the former “ghetto in the

meadow” into a welcoming, world-class facility with lodging available at the headquarters site on a year-round basis for visitors and researchers.

Al Levno, January 1993
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

256

economic components as well as ecological concepts. As urban growth led to

increased demands on natural resources and added pressure for updated land use

guidelines, the group explored whether ideas developed on the Andrews Forest

could be applied on agricultural, urban, or other landscapes altered by human use.

The question included both science and policy issues. At one level, scientists explored how to “restore” riparian areas where urban growth impinged on those

ecosystems. At another, the growing number of people changed the political context in which management decisions were made. Policymakers balanced scientific

concepts of land use planning against the competing priorities of a growing population, and people in the group were uncertain what roles they could play in that

process.4

The Andrews Forest is remote from regional centers of urban growth, but

people joined the group during the 1990s for reasons similar to those attracting

other immigrants to the Pacific Northwest. The place had a reputation, deserved

or not, of providing opportunities for individual success. Scientific productivity

was one measure of success, but prominent, continuing access to funding was

a measure of opportunity. Both scientific productivity and access to funding were

obvious attributes of the Andrews group by the early 1990s. Julia Jones, who

joined the Andrews group in 1991 after extensive work in north and east Africa and

after leaving an appointment on the faculty of the University of California at Santa

Barbara, was particularly struck by the availability of funding through the Long

Term Ecological Research (LTER) program that dwarfed programs with which

she was previously associated. While working in Africa, she learned of the group’s

involvement with the LTER program, and considered them “rich researchers.” As a

result, she had “ambivalent feelings about LTERs.” They were “so much better off”

in terms of funding and staffing that she didn’t see what she could offer by way of

making a “contribution,” nor did she ever see it as something that she “would have

wanted to do.” When she relocated to the Pacific Northwest for family reasons,

however, she was naturally drawn to the group, the body of work they had accumulated, and the opportunity for funded research that she discovered in that

com-munity. She perceived and exploited the long-term streamflow records from

monitoring efforts at the Andrews Forest as an underdeveloped resource, and she

earned a niche in the group by applying her skills to those data.5

4

 Interview with riparian group, 28.

5

 Interview with Julia Jones, 27 October 1997, by Max Geier at Jones’ home in Corvallis,

as transcribed by Keesje Hoekstra, 6.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

257

The reputation of the place attracted more people who arrived with only vague

notions of what the Andrews Forest had to offer or whether the site was even

relevant to their research interests. Preconceptions shaded initial perceptions of the

place, and the process of selecting a site for scientific research was personal and

social, as well as professional and scientific. Long-term associates of the group

were somewhat bemused when people came to the Andrews Forest with a set of

expectations for what they needed to do their research, but with little knowledge

of whether the place suited those needs.6

 They were drawn to the group for reasons less related to site characteristics on the Andrews Forest than with their own

preconceptions about the place. The group then helped them adapt their ideas to

the real conditions they encountered in the Pacific Northwest, on and beyond the

Andrews Forest.

The social process of selecting a site for scientific research brought people

together in ways that forged personal bonds and contributed to the potential success of a project. Stream team collaborators Norm Anderson, Stan Gregory, and

Linda Ashkenas, for example, had a memorable time simply picking out a site for

studying old-growth, clearcuts, and regrowth in relation to riparian concerns on

Grasshopper Creek. That and similar social experiences with other people on field

projects, Gregory remembers, “make it enjoyable and worthwhile.” People in the

group sustained their community with shared, social experiences at field sites that

they recalled as adventurous outings. In one case, Gregory and Chuck Hawkins

rode into the Grasshopper Creek drainage on a snowmobile to check potential

study sites during the winter. The snowmobile wasn’t big enough to carry both of

them and their gear, so Gregory and Hawkins took turns towing each other on skis

behind the machine. As they roared across the flats, Gregory bounced through a

big hole with the snowmachine. When Hawkins hit the same hole on his skies, he

“springboarded up about 15 feet in the air straight over a hill and crashed.” Linda

Ashkenas recalls that Gregory and Hawkins later “replicated” that experience while

driving in a car with her during field work on Mount St. Helens. She remembers

Gregory had his mouth full of mandarin orange slices as Hawkins drove “much

too fast down a road.” Gregory saw a hole coming up, but his mouth was full of

mandarin oranges, “so he just went, whoo, whoo, whoo.’ [laughter] Chuck and I

looked at him like ‘What is going on?’ and then we hit the hole.” Gregory later

6

 Interview with riparian group, 1-2, 20.

The reputation of

the place attracted

more people who

arrived with only

vague notions of

what the Andrews

Forest had to offer.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

258

explained, “‘whoo, whoo, whoo,’ ... means to stand on the top [in] Oregon.

[laughter] It is those experiences that actually keep us all in it. That is what makes

it enjoyable.”7

Social interaction—and the ability to laugh about it later—was also a critical

element of the adaptive management philosophy on the Blue River Ranger District

by the 1990s. Eubanks tried to keep people “actively involved” and communicating

with each other about their activities on the Andrews Forest. He worked to facilitate and mediate human interaction by identifying people with negative attitudes and

encouraging them to talk about it. He also tried to keep as many people on the district involved with as many of the scientists at the Andrews Forest as possible.8

7

 Interview with riparian group, 21.

8

 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 19.

Figure 48—Beginning in 1992, the U.S.

Geological Survey constructed and operated

an experimental debris flume at a location on

the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest near the

headquarters compound. At the time it was

constructed, this flume was the largest experimental flume in the country.

Al Levno
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

259

A new cohort of scientists and managers during the early 1990s tested the group’s

ability to sustain a community built on shared experience and informal opportunities

for social bonding. The proliferation of programs with links to the Andrews Forest

during this period forced the group to devise a more systematic strategy for maintaining a sociable spirit of community. In this era of transition, a few long-term

associates, including Swanson, Gregory, Lattin, Levno, and McKee, assumed more

prominent roles, but more recent recruits also shouldered much of the burden.

Biometrician Susan Stafford, ecologists Linda Ashkenas and Mark Harmon, entomologists Andy Moldenke and Tim Schowalter, and hydrologist Gordon Grant all

joined the group and assumed more prominent roles. These names are just a few

examples that illustrate this generational transition in leadership and involvement.

They identify the people most commonly mentioned by those interviewed for this

study. Many other people, however, also attended the monthly meetings of the

LTER/HJA Local Site Committee or participated in research that resulted in publications linked with the group.9

The core group of people who had already embraced the collaborative spirit of

the group helped a new cohort of scientists, managers, and administrators adapt to

the reality of the Andrews Forest. Within 3 years, beginning in 1989, John Cissel,

Lynn Burditt, Julia Jones, Gabriel Tucker, and Bob Griffiths all became closely

affiliated with the core group as research scientists or forest managers, and George

Brown succeeded Carl Stoltenberg as Dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon

State University (OSU) in 1990. These six people followed career paths that converged at the Andrews Forest in the last decade of the 20th century. Brown, who

had worked at the Andrews early in his career, digging soil pits during the International Biological Programme (IBP) era, brought a personal affinity for the place to

his role as an administrator at the university most closely associated with that

place. All six people followed career paths to the Andrews common to many of

their predecessors in the group. All of them made apparently serendipitous decisions that eventually led them to the Andrews Forest, and several of them returned

there in the 1990s to renew an involvement begun earlier in their academic careers.

Taken in context, however, something more than chance guided them in this

direction. One characteristic all of these people share is a place of origin not in

9

 Donald Henshaw, Sarah E. Greene, and Tami Lowry, “Research Publications of the H.J.

Andrews Experimental Forest, Cascade Range, Oregon: 1998 Supplement” (Portland,

OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station,

Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-427, July 1998).
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

260

the Pacific Northwest. They were recent migrants in a region of immigrants.

This contrasts with many people prominent in earlier cohorts of leadership at the

Andrews Forest, including Silen, Franklin, Levno, Sedell, and Eubanks, whose

experience in the Pacific Northwest began when they were children. This 1990s

cohort, however, consists of people who grew up in the northeastern and southcentral regions of the United States. Their most obvious, shared characteristic is

frequent geographic mobility in a closely interwoven network of research institutions and professional associations that converge in the Pacific Northwest at the

Andrews Forest. They are not a scientific sample, but they are examples of people

closely associated with the Andrews Forest, in terms of their personal identification with that group, regular participation in group meetings during 1996-98, or

frequent referral by other members of the group interviewed for this study. In a

period when regular attendance at monthly LTER/HJA Local Site Committee

Figure 49—The new conference/classroom, shown here nearing completion in February 1998,

seated nearly 100 people when it opened later that year, providing the first indoor meeting

space for large groups at the headquarters site. The Andrews group selected a design for the

vinyl flooring that depicts an old-growth tree.

 Al Levno
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

261

meetings averaged barely 20 people, these six researchers and forest managers

figured prominently in that forum.10

Management Transitions and Institutionalized Innovations at Blue

River Ranger District

The district ranger in Blue River was a crucial link in the administrative framework

linking research at the Andrews Forest to policy on the Willamette National Forest.

Lynn Burditt, who took over that assignment in 1989, worked with the group to

structure an institutional foundation for their collaborative efforts that would go

beyond the personal rapport and enthusiasm that Eubanks had offered. Burditt

also brought a stronger, national perspective to the position. As district ranger, she

argued that management initiatives at the Blue River District and the Andrews Forest should be relevant to and compliant with institutional goals in ways that could

be clearly articulated. Unlike Eubanks, her prior involvement with the group was

negligible. Her pathway into the group, however, was a composite of institutional

affiliations, academic preparation, and field experience common to other people at

the forefront of applied research at the Andrews Forest.

Burditt was born in Kentucky but grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and lived

in 17 different states as a young woman. Life in Oak Ridge is an experience many

of her associates at the Andrews Forest also shared. Sollins, Gregory, and Harmon,

for example, all had professional and academic connections with scientists at Oak

Ridge that influenced their career decisions. Burditt, however, was the only person

in the group who actually grew up there. From that experience, she gained an

appreciation, later in life, for the way in which a bureaucratic agency could influence what people considered “normal.” At Oak Ridge, she lived with the inescapable presence of Oak Ridge National Laboratories and she saw how that nuclear

research and production facility influenced the local community. In one respect,

10 Interview with John Cissel by Max Geier on 7 November 1997 in Logan Norris’ office

at the FSL, in Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Jeff Prater and Keesje Hoekstra, 1;

interview with Lynn Burditt by Max Geier on 3 October 1997 in Geier’s office at the

FSL, in Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Brooke Warren, 9; interview with Julia Jones, 1-

2; interview with Gabe Tucker by Max Geier on 19 August 1997 in Geier’s office at the

FSL, in Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Elizabeth Foster and Keesje Hoekstra, 1;

interview with Bob Griffiths by Max Geier on 6 November 1997 in Griffiths’ office at

the FSL, in Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Andy Coleman and Keesje Hoekstra, 1-2;

interview with Sherri Johnson by Max Geier on 24 November 1997 in Johnson’s office at

the FSL, in Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Lisa Fleming and Keesje Hoekstra, 1-3;

interview with George Brown by Max Geier on 19 September 1997 at Brown’s office in

Peavy Hall, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Brooke Warren and

Nicole Duncum, 1-2, 12.

Life in Oak Ridge is

an experience many

of her associates at

the Andrews Forest

also shared.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

262

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, resembled Blue River, Oregon: it was a place where relatively poor people with rural outlooks went about their lives while scientists with

doctoral degrees lived in a separate world in the same place. Her father worked for

the Navy in a high-security area at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Burditt had

no idea what her father did in that facility. At the time, she thought it was normal to

work in a place where workers could not talk to their own families about their

jobs.11 A strict hierarchy separated insiders from everyone else, and Burditt learned

how those barriers interfered with human interaction. Later, she discovered other

models for communicating in federal agencies

Oak Ridge schools pressured students to consider careers in science and

engineering, and Burditt followed that advice. She studied at the Syracuse College

of Environmental Sciences and Forestry before transferring to Iowa State University, where she graduated in the mid 1970s with a degree in Forest Management,

Outdoor Recreation, and Resource Management. One of her professors at Iowa

State was John Gordon, who later chaired the Forest Science department at OSU

and mentored many of his colleagues into work on the Andrews Forest before

moving on to become Dean of Forestry at Yale.12 Growing up, like Gregory, in the

vicinity of the Great Smokey Mountains, Burditt’s initial goal was a career with the

National Park Service. Federal jobs were scarce in the mid 1970s, however, and

Burditt did geomagnetic surveys for an aerial survey company in Houston, Texas,

until she finally secured a position with the Clearwater National Forest in Moscow,

Idaho, in 1977. Two years later, the Clearwater National Forest sent her to OSU for

a technical training program in forest engineering.13

Burditt gained national exposure and career mobility during and after that

Corvallis-based technical training program, which included field trips to the

Andrews Forest for a course in stream ecology. At the time, the group was absorbed in the effort to secure its first LTER grant with an emphasis on research

with an applied purpose. Ecological research was gaining national support, and

the technical training program introduced Burditt to a broad range of management

practices in different sectors of the Forest Service. Participants in the program

worked on projects for several different national forests during the summer. Burditt

drew assignments in North Carolina and Virginia, as well as more local stints with

the Mount Hood National Forest, where Eubanks was also employed, and at the

11 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 3-4.

12 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 4.

13 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 1.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

263

Shasta/Trinity National Forest in California. Her involvement in the training program

also helped Burditt secure a place on a Forest Service detail to Mount St. Helens to

work on the volcano recovery project in May 1981. From there, she moved on to

an assignment with the Flathead National Forest in Montana, where she served a

couple of years as the Forest Logging Engineer. For much of the 1980s, she served

as a management assistant responsible for planning, presale and layout, timber sale

administration, and compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. She

discovered that the Flathead National Forest was a “pretty controversial place,”

with hot-button management issues involving grizzly bear, bull trout, and scenic

Figure 50—District Ranger Lynn Burditt’s broad-based,

national experience and prior handling of controversial

issues made her a logical choice to replace Steve

Eubanks as the Andrews group became increasingly

prominent in the old-growth controversies of the 1990s.

Here, Burditt speaks at a field site on the Blue River

Ranger District during a tour of the H.J. Andrews

Experimental Forest that focused on the Slim Scout,

green tree retention, logging demonstration area.

Al Levno, July 1991
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

264

resources. With that experience, she earned promotion to district ranger in Whitefish, Montana, in 1987, serving in that capacity until 1989, when Kerrick hired her

to replace Steve Eubanks as District Ranger at Blue River.14

Kerrick hired Burditt just a year before he retired from the Forest Service, and

he expected her to build on the cooperative relations Eubanks had established with

researchers at the Andrews Forest. He also expected her to change the tone of that

program. Burditt had more extensive, wide-ranging experience in national forests

in the Western United States than Eubanks. She was also well seasoned in public

relations, having survived close, critical scrutiny as one of a handful of women

who worked their way into the mostly male profession of district rangers during

the 1980s. She had a solid reputation as a careful, fair-minded, and seasoned

administrator. Kerrick didn’t think she would be as “gung-ho” as Eubanks, but he

expected her to be “more effective” in adapting to the changing political climate

while implementing adaptive management areas and managing the “flow of information between researchers and management.” He found her to be “more cautious”

than Eubanks, who took actions about which, Kerrick “felt a little nervous,” even

though he didn’t want to discourage similar efforts. For her part, Burditt accepted

the position primarily because she was impressed with Kerrick and his support for

building on the partnership between the Blue River Ranger District and the Andrews

group.15

Burditt made an immediate contribution, working with Swanson, McKee,

and Kerrick, to define and implement a research liaison position at Blue River,

transforming a position that previously emphasized silviculture to one that addressed broader issues of landscape planning and management. Kerrick argued

the Willamette National Forest could be a leader in ecosystem management, and

toward that end, he agreed to fund the newly defined research liaison position from

his national forest budget. The person who filled the position would work as a

“transfer agent,” to help “move information” from managers to researchers and

from researchers to managers.16 The immediacy of the owl issue and the public

scrutiny that accompanied the injunction that halted logging in old growth in those

years made the idea of a research liaison particularly inviting to forest managers on

the Willamette National Forest. At the Blue River Ranger District, in particular, the

staff faced a steady flow of visitors interested in old growth and related issues. In

14 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 3.

15 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 4-5, 7-8; interview with Mike Kerrick, 18-19.

16 Interview with Mike Kerrick, 18-19.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

265

Burditt’s first year at Blue River, visitors from various political groups, international

organizations, and media outlets swarmed over the Andrews Forest and the surrounding district in search of information and ideas. Among other innovations,

Burditt developed a tracking system to keep tabs on everyone who visited the

Andrews and the surrounding district. The system, she argued, was an effort to

exploit an opportunity, not a reaction to concerns about security at the site. The

Andrews Forest attracted people who took ideas from that place to apply elsewhere. Those people, therefore, were a potential network for disseminating ideas

and information from the Andrews group to others who might put those ideas into

practice.17 Burditt’s tracking system simply documented and systematized the

informal networks that already linked the Andrews group with scientists and forest

managers at other sites.

Burditt favored the proposal to shift the emphasis to a landscape planning and

management research liaison at the Blue River Ranger District as a strategy for

managing the challenge of public scrutiny and media attention at the Andrews Forest. As a native of Oak Ridge, Burditt was no stranger to living and working with

leading scientists and intellectuals, but she later recalled a sense of being at the

center of something momentous in her role at Blue River. She described the setting

in almost mystical terms: One day, as, she walked through Reference Stand 2 with

some visiting VIPs accompanying a work party on their way to open a trail through

that site, they encountered Jerry Franklin walking up the hill, and “... the sun shone

through just at the right moment [and shone on him], you know, it was like ... the

mountain had come to talk.” The ranger district was on a fast track to national

prominence, and a series of reporters visited and featured the place in the New York

Times, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, Discovery Magazine, and on public

television. Burditt neither expected nor wanted a high-profile position, but it was an

unavoidable part of her job at Blue River. She took over from Eubanks just as concerns about old growth and the northern spotted owl peaked, and by that time, he

had already established the district’s reputation as a place for people who wanted to

learn how to apply scientific theories about riparian reserves, riparian management

areas, green tree retention, and woody debris.18

The concept of a research liaison working with national forest staff and

Andrews Forest scientists evolved from an earlier initiative to establish a silviculturist assigned to the Andrews Forest and funded through the national forest. That

17 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 9.

18 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 10.

The Andrews Forest

attracted people

who took ideas from

that place to apply

elsewhere.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

266

initiative built from the premise that, given the previous rate of harvest activity at

the Andrews Forest, the district needed to develop a long-term plan for managing

silviculture of the Douglas-fir plantations that early cutting created on that drainage.

Vince Pulao, who worked as the silviculturist at Blue River several years before

Burditt became district ranger, resigned just a few weeks after she arrived and took

a new assignment in the Eugene office of the Willamette National Forest. As they

planned the search for Pulao’s replacement, Burditt and other leaders in the group

were also beginning to explore the concept of a Blue River landscape study. The

study called for an aggregate of clustered cutting units, rather than the more usual

practice of dispersing them across the landscape. They wanted to implement that

concept on the Blue River Ranger District so they could study the consequences of

the aggregated (as opposed to dispersed) cutting plan at a landscape scale. They

realized the research questions the group was exploring could not be adequately

addressed without moving outside the Andrews Forest to areas where substantial

logging was anticipated and on a scale larger than the experimental forest could

accommodate. As Burditt considered how to implement the idea, she realized the

position description for the Andrews silviculturist did not adequately describe the

skills needed to manage the proposed landscape study.19

Once they realized the demands of the job had outgrown the standards expected of a silviculture specialist, District Ranger Burditt worked with Andrews

site director McKee (an employee of OSU) and Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station scientist Swanson to draft a new position description for a “research

liaison.” The person in that position would primarily be responsible for installing the

Blue River landscape study. The new position description defined a wide range of

roles in broad terms, and it included an upgrade from GS-11 to a GS-12 on the

federal scale of job classifications. McKee, Swanson, Burditt, and Rolf Anderson,

the lead planning officer with the Willamette National Forest supervisor’s office,

then sat down to select a candidate for the job. The person they chose was John

Cissel, who stood out from other applicants for his experience in forest planning

and modeling and for his demonstrated interest in ecological research.20

19 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 10-11.

20 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 10-11.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

267

Facilitating Collaboration With a Foot in Both Worlds and a Home

in Neither

Cissel stands out from his colleagues in the Andrews group as someone who was

recruited specifically because of the existing collaboration between researchers and

managers. Others were recruited or drawn to the group because of their clear interest in collaborative research or because of their demonstrated ability to cooperate

effectively with researchers and managers. Cissel, however, was hired to fill a

position designed to institutionalize that collaborative spirit and to serve as a catalyst

for moving beyond that initial beachhead. In that role, he had few benchmarks or

guides, and no real peers in the Willamette National Forest or even in the Pacific

Northwest Region (Region 6). He didn’t know anyone in the agency with a similar

position.21

Cissel had only a vague understanding of his responsibilities as the Willamette

National Forest’s research liaison with the Andrews Forest. He had an even vaguer

sense of his subsequent career path or the standards by which he would be evaluated. The job appealed to him because it offered the otherwise unlikely opportunity

to develop his own research interests in the management branch of the Forest

21 Interview with John Cissel, 3.

Figure 51—John Cissel, who was hired as the Willamette National Forest’s

research liaison with the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews Forest), worked to bridge the gap between the operational priorities of forest

managers and conceptual theories of scientific researchers. Here, he measures

the diameter of an old-growth Douglas-fir on the Andrews Forest, Blue River

Ranger District, Willamette National Forest.

Ken Hammond, August 1991
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

268
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

269

Service. The Blue River position was unique because it assigned someone stationed

on a ranger district responsibility for coordinating, implementing, and monitoring

research, and for educating other people about those efforts. Burditt also encouraged Cissel to develop his own research agenda. That was an unusual opportunity

for a position in a district, and Cissel’s rank (GS-12) was also unusually high for a

district, where people more typically were responsible for laying out trails, preparing timber sales, or managing wildlife. Since the people who hired him seemed

uncertain about how to define his job, Cissel could shape it to suit his interests.

Even his title was uncertain. Swanson tended to call him a research liaison, but

Cissel called himself a research coordinator. His job classification listed him as an

ecologist. He had never worked in that field, but he did hold graduate degrees in

forestry and operations research, and he included ecology and ecosystem modeling

among his fields of academic preparation.22

The man hired as research liaison personified both the institutional structure

that linked science with management at the Andrews Forest and the group’s hopes

for ecosystem management. The position, like the Andrews itself, was subject to

the joint oversight of the Willamette National Forest, PNW Station, and OSU. The

group, paradoxically, attempted to institutionalize its interagency framework with a

position that largely depended on the personality and abilities of the person they

hired. It was an uneasy pairing of personal and political responsibility with limited

authority. That combination was not necessarily an attractive opportunity for someone schooled in the hierarchical traditions of the Forest Service. At the time the

position at Blue River opened, however, Cissel was at a point in his career where

the administrative distinction between the research and management branches of

the Forest Service threatened to divorce his personal and professional goals. The

research liaison position allowed him to forestall that split while advancing his

career. It made him an employee of the Willamette National Forest, but he reported to a board of directors: one from PNW, one from OSU, and one from the

Willamette National Forest. Swanson, Burditt, and McKee gave him broad direction

at quarterly meetings of the board. The national forest issued his paycheck, but he

considered himself an employee of the group that directed his work, and together,

they tried to determine “collective priorities.”23

The career path that brought Cissel to this new position was unique but not

remote from others in the group. He grew up on a dairy farm in Montgomery

22 Interview with John Cissel, 3.

23 Interview with John Cissel, 1, 5.

The man hired as

research liaison

personified the

institutional structure that linked

science with management at the

Andrews Forest

and the group’s

hopes for ecosystem management.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

270

County, Maryland, until it was swallowed up by the urban growth of metropolitan

Washington, DC. His academic career touched down at several universities where

Sedell and Swanson had contacts. He attended the State University of New York

and Michigan State University, where he completed a BS degree in forestry. Like

Eubanks, his choice of major was driven by a vague interest in forestry and hopes

for employment in that field. He followed up the undergraduate degree with graduate studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he specialized in forest planning

and operations research, with an emphasis on systems modeling and research forests. During his graduate years, Cissel also worked for a few summers in northern

Idaho. That experience revived images of the old-growth forests in the Cascade

Mountains and Olympic Peninsula that he gleaned from National Geographic in

earlier years—pictures of “hugely productive and lush forests and snow-covered

mountains.” Thereafter, he began exploring opportunities for employment in the

Pacific Northwest. After graduate school, however, he worked for the Allegheny

National Forest, working with other staff to develop a prototype forest plan. He

hoped to translate that experience into a position in the Pacific Northwest because

he simply realized that “this was the region where I wanted to come.”24

The personal and the political converged for Cissel during his early career in

the Forest Service, and that convergence eventually led him to the Andrews group.

He worked during the early 1980s as an operations research analyst working on the

forest plan for the Richmond National Forest until 1985, when he took a summer

position with the Willamette National Forest. In that period of transition for forestry

practices in the Pacific Northwest, Cissel found “a lot of opportunity” and “lots of

things happening” in his new position. He led a team of people assigned to explore

possibilities for a research plan for the Willamette National Forest. His team classified—from a landscape point of view—ecological functions of old-growth forests

and translated that information into landscape-level priorities to help managers

decide whether, when, and where to cut. Cissel first encountered the Andrews

group at a meeting where he presented his work with the Willamette National Forest. As he presented his team’s ideas, Cissel ran into Swanson and McKee, who

suggested some additional scenarios Cissel’s group might try. When his team

followed up on that suggestion, Cissel “felt it was cool and we enjoyed working

with it.”25 It was the beginning of his collaborative work with the group.

24 Interview with John Cissel, 1.

25 Interview with John Cissel, 2.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

271

Cissel staked an early claim to the vaguely defined middle ground between the

research and management wings of the Andrews group. That professional stance,

he argues, left him somewhat apart from both wings: “I have to operate in both

cultures and make the connections. ... lots of folks up here [at the Corvallis FSL]

tend to see me as a down-to-earth, pragmatic, get-it-done kind of person because

that’s the role I have to play a lot of times. But, ... the [Blue River Ranger] District,

lots of times, sees me as this airy research person coming in [with] ideas and

concepts and not real connected with how you get stuff done. That’s the role I

play—to try to bring both sides a little closer together with what’s reality here.”26

Adaptive Planning and Collaborative Initiatives on the Willamette

National Forest

The group’s efforts to bridge the gap between research and policy strained the

limits of the Andrews Forest as an institutional base for their work, especially as

they moved from relative obscurity into the public eye. During the early 1990s, the

group established the Cascade Center for Ecosystem Management to more clearly

define their research-management partnership, which conducted applied studies,

and to communicate their findings to a broader, public audience. One important

venue for communicating the group’s ideas involved taking visitors on tours of the

Andrews Forest and neighboring national forest land. These tours typically began

early in the morning at a field site where members of the group presented findings

from basic research on streams and long-term studies, such as the 200-year log

decomposition study site. After a midday break, the discussion continued at sites

on the Blue River Ranger District where the staff showed visitors how they implemented concepts from research presented earlier in the day. These tours, however,

sometimes generated questions that could not be answered with field demonstrations on the small piece of real estate that included the Blue River Ranger District

and the Andrews Forest. The group wanted to explore landscape management

approaches at a larger scale and on other forests.27

The group’s strategy for testing their model beyond the Andrews largely

depended on the Research Liaison at Blue River. Swanson, McKee, and Burditt

all worked on landscape projects at the Andrews Forest, and the group was looking for a new, integrative focus for research there. These concerns influenced the

group’s plans for the Cascade Center for Ecosystems Management in 1991. Cissel,

26 Interview with John Cissel, 10.

27 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 14.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

272

meanwhile, needed to secure his status with the Willamette National Forest in a

position that was only vaguely defined and therefore potentially vulnerable in times

of budgetary reductions. The group’s initial plans called for the Research Liaison

to install a forest fragmentation study in Blue River, but that idea ran afoul of the

recovery plan for the spotted owl. The supercharged politics of the spotted owl

issue directly blocked efforts to implement the landscape project when interim

directives put the Blue River watershed within a habitat conservation area (HCA),

where the recovery plan prohibited manipulative activities. The landscape project

that Cissel was supposed to install would have called for timber harvests in aggregated and dispersed clearcuts, but the HCA designation prohibited that activity.

The HCA also threatened the group’s other programs because a cartographic error

mistakenly included half of the Andrews Forest in its boundaries. McKee immediately filed a protest, and with Kerrick’s support, appealed to the Regional Forester

to change the boundary of the HCA to exclude the Andrews Forest. Pending that

appeal, the western half of the Andrews Forest was off limits to any manipulations

whatsoever for about 2 years. The area intended for the forest fragmentation study

in Blue River, however, appeared to be permanently off limits.28

Habitat conservation areas were intended to protect the old-growth habitat and

migration corridors necessary to sustain a viable, breeding population of northern

spotted owls, but this particular HCA blocked a landscape study that the group

hoped, among other things, would help federal agencies manage more effectively

for old-growth conditions. The Interagency Scientific Committee followed a detailed process governing the selection of HCA areas that provided venues for public

hearings,29 but its designation of an HCA that excluded much of the Blue River

watershed from manipulative management knocked the group off its stride. It also

eroded the premise for funding Cissel’s position through the Willamette National

Forest. Cissel had to “start from scratch” to build a program that supplied a purpose for his position. Kerrick asked him, “Now what you going to do? Is there

gonna be any workload for you?” In retrospect, Cissel views that as “a laughable

kind of question.” At the time, however, he felt the pressure to “create a program,”

28 Andrews group interview 22 September 1997, 45.

29 Jack Ward Thomas, Eric D. Forsman, Joseph B. Lint, [and others], “A Conservation

Strategy for the Northern Spotted Owl” (Portland, OR: Interagency Scientific Committee

to Address the Conservation of the Northern Spotted Owl, Report, May 1990), 283-297.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

273

and he worked with the group to establish the Cascade Center that first year.

Rolf Anderson helped the group identify and define functional areas with specific

funding codes in the line item budget for Region 6 and then linked those different

line items together to create a budget for the Cascade Center.30

The Cascade Center needed a clear, functional purpose to qualify for line-item

funds from the Forest Service, and Cissel assumed much of the burden for defining one. He focused his efforts away from the Andrews, looking for a site elsewhere on the district that could be integrated into an existing, regional network

of Long Term Ecosystem Productivity (LTEP) sites. He quickly identified a site

close to the Andrews, and his LTEP proposal leaned heavily on that facility’s reputation as a center for long-term studies. Cissel hoped the LTEP would provide

some stability and funding for the research program at the Blue River District. With

the LTEP site installed, he also helped initiate a young-stand thinning and diversity

project, and he organized a landscape project on the district at Augusta Creek,

outside the area governed by the HCA.31

The Cascade Center was not entirely Cissel’s idea. Burditt, Swanson, McKee,

and others tried to restructure the group’s efforts to reach an audience beyond the

Andrews well before Cissel joined them. Amidst recurring visits by Congressional

delegations and many others, the group discussed the “tremendous level of media

attention to Andrews research and spinoff forestry practices” at their monthly

meeting in July 1990. The reputation of the place was attracting resources and

attention from other federal agencies. The U.S. Geological Survey, for example,

initiated plans in that month to build a debris-flow flume at the headquarters site,

within easy walking distance of a newly built, 16-bedroom dormitory funded by

the Forest Service. At their July 1990 meeting, the Andrews group discussed these

developments and noted an “increasing need for more organized interface with the

public.”32

The group brainstormed ways to create a formal public entity that conveyed

their concept of collaborative research and management in ways that an “experimental forest” could not. Institutes and centers were popular organizational concepts in the Forest Service and universities in the early 1990s, and PNW Station

had recently established two of them: the Copper River Delta Institute in Alaska

and the Blue Mountains Institute in eastern Oregon. The group decided they needed

30 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 14; interview with John Cissel, 7.

31 Interview with John Cissel, 8.

32 Minutes of LTER/HJA Local Site Committee meeting (7 July 1990).

The reputation of

the place was attracting resources

and attention from

other federal

agencies.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

274

a similar structure to pull together the various fragments and threads of research

programs, grants, initiatives, and science-management teams in which they participated. While the LTER provided a central organizing theme for basic science, the

group lacked a central identity of the strong research-management partnership that

had evolved at the Andrews. A center could provide the formal, organizational

structure they needed to reach across multiple agency and geographic boundaries

and establish an institutional identity that the informal Andrews group otherwise

lacked. With the Cascade Center for Ecosystem Management, people in the group

hoped to reconcile their group’s informal identity with the bureaucratic structures

on which they relied. The center they proposed was a concept or a program of

work, not a place or a building, but it was a real, sponsoring agency that they

directly controlled. It would coordinate the group’s wide array of activities and

public service interests involving adaptive management and related research and

management questions. It would support the group’s efforts to implement projects

designed to answer those questions and then coordinate efforts to integrate the

results from such projects with other, related work. The center would also facilitate the group’s efforts to communicate an integrated view of its programs with

practical demonstrations and education forums.33

The group’s effort to establish the Cascade Center for Ecosystem Management

in the early 1990s was collaborative, informal, and more circuitous than linear.

Cissel, for example, explains how he ran across a chance reference describing

how the Chief of the Forest Service had designated a “demonstration forest” on

the Ouachita National Forest. “I started thinking,” he recalls, “‘Well you know,

we’ve got the Andrews, all this stuff going on here, then we’ve got these other

research projects kind of scattered all over the place, then we got the LTEP, the

Young Stand Diversity [Silviculture Study], we got Augusta Creek [Landscape

Study], the whole district that’s involved in significant ways in terms of developing and applying ecosystems information, maybe we are a demonstration district:

Blue River Demonstration District.’” When he floated that idea during a conversation with Swanson, McKee, Gregory, and Grant on their way back from a field

trip at the Augusta Creek site, Cissel recalls, “People said, ‘Well, that sounds kind

of cool.’” With that understated vote of confidence, he took the matter up with

Burditt, who cautiously encouraged Cissel with the comment, “You know, that’s

kind of interesting, lots of implications there.” Cissel next floated his idea past Rolf

33 Max G. Geier, Forest Science Research and Scientific Communities in Alaska (Portland,

OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station,

Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-426, March 1998), 187; interview with Lynn Burditt, 14.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

275

Anderson, in the Forest supervisor’s office, just as Kerrick happened by: “So I got

up and got to the map and I pitched it to Mike, and ... he felt that was really cool

too, so I started writing it up.” In working with Swanson to refine the proposal,

however, Cissel notes, “I hit a snag. Somebody said ‘Demonstration District? That

sounds like, you know, you’re gonna, maybe not cut as much timber or something.

... it doesn’t seem like a good idea,’ or something like that. The connotation of a

Demonstration District was too much for somebody along the way.” The reputation of the Andrews group, however, rescued the idea from oblivion. Portlandoffice coordinators for an internal, Forest Service reform initiative known as “New

Perspectives” visited the Andrews because, as Cissel recalls, “They recognized our

history ... as a place that was innovating and developing new practices. And so we

laid out this same kind of thing for them and what we were thinking about for a

Demonstration District.” Cissel argues the experience had a formative influence

on the New Perspectives program: “At that stage, they were trying to figure out

what structure ... this New Perspective program should have. And we said, ‘This

is kind of what we were thinking, but maybe ... a different title than Demonstration District.’” After some effort, Cissel concludes, “We hit upon Cascade Center.

And that Center label, Steve McDonald was the PNW New Perspectives manager

there, ... he said, ‘I think that’s got potential.’”34

The Cascade Center was up and running by 20 September 1991, when it

shared top billing with the LTER as the heading for the minutes of the monthly

meeting of the Andrews group. Those in attendance at that meeting participated in

an extended briefing and discussion on the Cascade Center. Briefing documents

observed, “Communications are a major emphasis of the Center.” They included a

six-point statement of objectives: producing information about ecosystems; developing management systems that incorporate new information about ecosystems;

correlating management practices with social values; developing more effective

processes of public participation; sharing new information about ecosystems, management practices, and social connections to ecosystem management; and adapting

management practices in conjunction with the Willamette National Forest plan

mechanisms to keep them current with new knowledge. The briefing emphasized

local, regional, national, and international links with the Cascade Center, notably

including landscape ecology workshops for four national forests, New Perspectives demonstration areas and sites for the Young Stand Study on three districts of

the Willamette National Forest, long-term field studies, studies of biodiversity

34 Interview with John Cissel, 8-9.
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276

and long-term site productivity, and analysis of cumulative effects of management

on hydrology and fish habitat on “a variety of watersheds across the Willamette

National Forest.” According to those briefing documents, “The guiding concept

giving coherence to the whole collection of projects underway is called Adaptive

Management.” That concept was based on the fundamental premise that “We do

not now know, and may never know, all that we would like to know about how

resource and social systems operate, and that we must proceed with management

actions despite incomplete knowledge. Adaptive Management is an active information-seeking strategy guiding design of management, research, and monitoring

projects.”35

Once established, the Cascade Center was a convenient handle for the fluid

network of personal contacts that supported programs at the Andrews Forest and

elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It was intended to break down the distinction

between “applied” and “basic” research to promote further cooperation among

forest managers and researchers. The development team for the Center modeled

that process. In addition to Burditt, Cissel, McKee, and Swanson, that team included Anderson, a planner with the Willamette National Forest, and Darryl Kenops,

Mike Kerrick’s successor as forest supervisor. Kenops continued where Kerrick

left off, supporting the science-management partnership centered on the Andrews.

That support was critical when the agency was down-sized in the early 1990s.

Kenops, along with his deputy supervisor, John Nelson, helped the group counter

suggestions from other sectors of the agency that the Cascade Center was a “discretionary item” and therefore subject to budget cuts in lean years. Other Forest

Service administrators particularly questioned whether funding for Cissel’s position

helped the district meet its targets to produce fish structures, timber volume, or

recreation visitor days. With support from Nelson and Kenops, however, Burditt

countered those concerns by arguing, along with Cissel, that “Part of our responsibility, because of this setting that we have, is generating new knowledge.” The

center and Cissel, she argued, helped the district meet those goals and objectives.

Burditt’s arguments eventually carried the day, but not without some controversy

over the human costs of funding the center over other positions in the agency. The

Willamette National Forest dropped from 770 permanent employees to barely 400

during the 1990s, and for managers like Burditt, that reduction in force was “very

painful” and “controversial.” Ultimately, they had to decide “What is ‘necessary

work’?”36

35 “Minutes of LTER/Cascade Center meeting,” 20 September 1991.

36 Interview with Lynn Burditt, 14.

Willamette National

Forest dropped

from 770 permanent

employees to barely

400. Managers like

Burditt ultimately

had to decide

“What is ‘necessary

work’?”
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

277

The Andrews Group, “Necessary Work,” and the Northwest

Forest Plan

Amid the social and cultural dislocation of communities in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s, the Andrews group joined a regional effort that effectively

redefined the nature of “necessary work” in forest management and forest research. The Cascade Center for Ecosystem Management and the Research Liaison

position were self-conscious efforts to institutionalize the community ethic of

collaborative research and management at the Andrews Forest. That effort evolved

in the context of productive and ongoing interactions among scientists and local

forest managers on the Blue River Ranger District. The experience of collaborative involvement in the effort to develop the riparian management guide for the

Willamette National Forest between 1988 and 1990 gave some members of the

group a taste of success in moving from a theory to implementing that theory

(technology transfer) on a broad scale beyond the Andrews. The riparian management guide was intended to “provide guidance for implementation of the Standards

and Guidelines of the Willamette National Forest Land and Resource Management

Plan (1990) for Riparian Management Areas.” It was the product of the Willamette

National Forest Task Force, including advice and technical review by representatives from the Willamette National Forest, OSU, PNW Station, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fisheries Council. It

was also translated into a guide for land managers in Japan. The guide overviewed

riparian resource values, and it laid out strategies for landscape management, basin

management, harvest-unit manage-ment, riparian rehabilitation, and monitoring

efforts. As a guiding principle at the landscape scale, the guide postulated, “Land

use practices that maintain the natural patterns and dynamics of riparian communities across the Willamette National Forest can minimize long-term degradation of

riparian resources.” It also suggested that “the array of interior old-growth forests

can be continuously linked along the mature to old-growth forests within riparian

management zones ... [that] can also serve as corridors for the dispersal of plants

and animals between harvested watersheds, roadless areas, wilderness areas,

special habitat management areas, and designated recreational lands.”37

37 Stan Gregory and Linda Ashkenas, “Riparian Management Guide: Willamette National

Forest” (Portland: Pacific Northwest Region, Forest Service, U.S. Department of

Agriculture, 1990), 21.
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Leaders in the Andrews group participated more directly in management

planning from the Willamette National Forest to the regional scale with the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan was a federal initiative spinning out of the debate over

habitat for spotted owls. It originated with a presidential directive from William

Clinton, who convened a forest conference in Portland, Oregon, on 2 April 1993,

in the first year of his administration. The Clinton directive charged participants in

that conference, including members of his White House Cabinet, with the mission

of devising a science-based forest management plan that would protect and enhance the environment, provide a sustainable timber economy, support people and

communities in the region, and ensure interagency cooperation. Between 1993 and

1996, that effort consumed the time and energy of many scientists in federal

agencies, including many people in the Andrews group.38

The group’s involvement in the Northwest Forest Plan tested their ability to

translate the ideals of ecosystem management beyond the relatively supportive

leadership of the Willamette National Forest. It was purportedly a regional planning strategy balancing scientific theory with economic, political, and cultural

constraints in the Pacific Northwest. By the end of the decade, the group’s leaders pointed to the Northwest Forest Plan as among the most significant efforts

to which they contributed, but they also noted that their work on that initiative

drained their energies, diverted their focus from ongoing efforts at the Andrews,

and required personal and professional sacrifices.39

Despite the work that went into creating the Northwest Forest Plan, some

people in the Andrews group believed that ongoing research into alternative models

of landscape planning and management could lead to a quite different, workable

approach. Cissel, for example, admits his personal bias for a project in which he

was personally involved, but he argues the Augusta Creek Project was a more

important contribution than the Northwest Forest Plan: “We really pioneered a

different way of thinking about how [the] landscape should be planned to meet

multiple, integrated, ecological [and] commercial objectives.” The group’s Augusta

Project, he argues, showed that linkage at the landscape scale of implementation.

At Augusta Creek, the group developed a management plan for a large landscape

that considered those objectives in both spatial and temporal contexts. They modeled specific management objectives in a context that showed how other people

38 Tuchmann, Connaughton, Freedman, and Moriwaki, “The Northwest Forest Plan: a

Report to the President and Congress,” 1-8.

39 Interview with Stan Gregory, 19.
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279

could implement the same ideas at a landscape scale. The approach, Cissel observes, differed significantly from the Northwest Forest Plan, which called for a

mosaic of reserves and corridors in a matrix of land where some logging could

take place. This was an approach largely driven by conservation-biology concerns,40 but the Northwest Forest Plan, in effect, directed the group to further

develop the ideas in the Augusta Creek Plan through their work as the Central

Cascades Adaptive Management Area.

The group’s involvement with the Northwest Forest Plan originated with their

earlier work on the Willamette National Forest Land Management Plan of 1990,

when the Forest Service began to change the way it operated on the ground.

The principle of good public relations also supported innovations in the Willamette

National Forest Guidelines of 1990. Forest Supervisor Kerrick exemplified the

trend in an op-ed essay he wrote for the Eugene and Corvallis newspapers in

August that year. Noting that managing a large and valuable federal property like

the Willamette National Forest was “really managing nature,” Kerrick asserted his

belief in the basic paradigm that “humans can live in harmony with nature, and we

need to continue to learn how to do so.” Toward that end, he argued, “We are fortunate to have the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest.... Much of what we know

has come from this priceless research property.” He also credited the “citizen

owners” of the Willamette National Forest with “shaping a new future for the

forest” that, he suggested, was enshrined in the Forest Plan that his office had

recently devised. Promising both a “New Look” and a “New Way of Doing Business,” Kerrick focused on “special places” on the Willamette National Forest

representing 53 percent of its land base and 50 percent of its “old-growth inventory” from which “there will be no scheduled timber harvest.” He emphasized

efforts to incorporate “the best available scientific information into our standards

and guidelines” with the goal of ensuring that “while producing a significant output

of needed forest products, our projects will be more environmentally sensitive.” As

examples of new standards for the Willamette National Forest, Kerrick announced

plans for “leaving standing live and dead trees and large woody debris in harvest

areas to provide diversity in wildlife habitat; protecting riparian zones; and designing projects from a larger landscape perspective.” Conceding that he was announcing these new guidelines in controversial times, Kerrick promised that it would

40 Interview with John Cissel, 14.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

280

“provide stability as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service develops a recovery plan

for the spotted owl.”41

The management plan for the Willamette National Forest that Kerrick announced in 1990 was, in part, the product of 2 years of collaboration in the

Andrews group. Gregory, who played a central role in that effort, recalls a somewhat serendipitous process that presented him with unexpected influence in the

planning effort. The group’s riparian studies in the early 1980s disclosed problems

with existing Forest Service guidelines. Then, when the Forest Service was required to develop a new Forest plan in the late 1980s, the agency recruited people

in the group to draft riparian management guidelines for the Willamette National

Forest. When the committee bogged down, District Rangers Herb Wick and

Steve Eubanks asked Gregory if he would complete the initial draft himself. He

recruited Linda Ashkenas, and together, they drafted a complete set of new guidelines. Gregory was surprised to find the Willamette National Forest “really open” to

their proposals. Contrary to his expectations, the national forest staff had surprisingly little criticism of the standards he and Ashkenas drafted. Their Guidelines

called for no harvest in any riparian management zones, and included all flood

plains within those zones. They called for substantial buffer strips, even on ephemeral, tributary streams. When they sent those proposals out to the ranger districts

for comments, Gregory “expected the timber beasts to just go crazy.” The only

comments, however, were suggestions on how to strengthen the proposal and give

it “more meat.”42

Established traditions of collaborative relations with Eubanks and ranger district staff at Blue River smoothed the way for Gregory and Ashkenas and laid the

foundation for extending that precedent beyond the Willamette National Forest. The

most potentially volatile criticism they confronted, Gregory recalls, was defused by

an informal exchange during a field demonstration. The guideline they expected to

draw the most fire from timber-oriented managers was the prohibition on harvests

in the riparian management zones. When that point came up for discussion during a

field excursion to explain the proposed guidelines, however, the timber operations

leader for the Blue River Ranger District spoke in support of the guidelines. He told

his peers in other districts that until they knew for sure what adverse effects their

actions would have, they “shouldn’t be messing around in there.” The collaborative

41 Corvallis Gazette Times, 27 August 1990.

42 Interview with Stan Gregory, 18.
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281

ethic of Kerrick’s “New Look” forestry was especially apparent in an exchange

that came later in the same field trip. On the last stop of the day, Kerrick asked

Gregory and Ashkenas to explain why they should enforce buffers on ephemeral

streams, observing, “There’s a lot of them up here. What’s your reasoning on

that?” Gregory was encouraged by the question: “The cool thing was, he wasn’t

saying ‘This is crazy!’ ... He was saying, ‘What are you thinking? I mean why

would we do this?’” When they explained that large wood stabilized landslides and

debris flow and slowed down the runout distance, Kerrick suggested that on a

“stable” watershed with an ephemeral stream and a lot of understory vegetation

protecting the creek, the buffer strips really were not necessary to protect the

riparian conditions from debris flows. When the scientists confirmed that if the

watershed were genuinely “stable” that would be true, Kerrick suggested they go

“back to the drawing board” and rewrite “just this one section so that you can deal

with all the functions you’ve identified? But don’t make an across-the-board buffer

strip.” Gregory considered the resulting refinements a significant improvement over

the original draft. Most importantly, the buffer strip concept established a precedent

for forest management at a critical juncture for agency planning in the Pacific

Northwest:

We ended up with ... a classification of unstable lands and moderately stable, and stable. So we said ‘Okay, you have to have this

25-75 foot no-harvest buffer strip on ephemeral streams, if it’s in

an unstable category. There’s an intermediate practice for the moderately stable [category], and then, you don’t have to have any special precautions on the stable-class forest.’ And so that was the

first time that I know of in this region that they were leaving buffer strips on little streams that dry up in the summer. And so they

adopted them, and they’d just been in place for a little bit less than

a year when the ... Timber Summit occurred with Clinton. ... as a

result, the Willamette plan didn’t get as much visibility in and of

itself, it just helped in the evolution into the Northwest Forest

Plan.43

The group’s involvement in the Northwest Forest Plan was a logical expansion

of their collaborative work with the Willamette National Forest and their success

with landscape-scale studies. Those earlier efforts had already attracted national

attention by 1992. The Forest Service, in that year, awarded the Andrews-Blue

River-Cascade Center the agency’s 1991 Centennial Conservation Award for continuing efforts to improve conservation and land stewardship through the group’s

43 Interview with Stan Gregory, p. 18.

The group’s

involvement in the

Northwest Forest

Plan was a logical

expansion of their

collaborative work

and their success

with landscapescale studies.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

282

research-management partnership.44 The Augusta Creek Demonstration Project,

well underway by that time, was an important manifestation of that partnership,

and it was a self-confident expression of the group’s determination to continue

those collaborative efforts. An early statement of the project’s goals and priorities

emphasized the diversity of land use designations and research activities on the

20,000-acre area of Blue River District allocated for the Augusta Creek study. The

area encompassed general forest land, wilderness, scenic river corridor, and other

“special” designations. Activities included efforts to compile data characterizing

vegetation and disturbance history (especially wildfire), in an effort to identify

“natural processes and patterns” with the intent of defining “desired future conditions” for the area. This effort would provide the base for devising “alternative

management scenarios” that would be “tested through public participation, modeling, and other techniques” with the ultimate goal of arriving at “a management plan

embodying New Perspectives principles.”45 Looking back at the evolution of the

Augusta Creek Project 7 years later, Cissel considers it “really unique.” The project

was a synthesis of the various threads of research at the Andrews Forest and the

planning and modeling experience that Cissel brought to the group. Most models

of forest planning revolved around the timber harvest: how much, at what rate,

and in which patterns. The Augusta Creek project included that concept of modeling timber harvest over time and space, but applied it to “more of an ecological

point of view.” Cissel explains the concept as “scheduling to meet the sustained

flow of timber harvest that meets ... sustained-flow of desirable ecosystem

conditions.46

Through the late 1990s, the collaboration of forest managers and scientists

linked through the Cascade Center provided a focus and purpose for a disparate

collection of more specialized studies. The emphasis on technology transfer and

breaking down barriers between theory and practice, in itself, became an integrative force for the Andrews group. Their work at Augusta Creek, from 1991 to

1998, for example, pulled together several different threads of research and management interests. The Augusta Creek Project, however, was just one of several

landscape-scale projects underway during the decade of the 1990s. The group

ethic of applied research and collaborative engagement among forest managers

and scientists was institutionalized in the briefing documents for the Cascade

44 Minutes of the LTER-Cascade Center meeting (1 May 1992).

45 Minutes of the LTER-Cascade Center meeting (20 September 1991).

46 Interview with John Cissel, 2.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

283

Center. That concept, and the projects that built on it, apparently bonded people

to the Andrews Forest as much as it encouraged them to participate in broader

regional initiatives.

Warren Cohen, for example, had joined the group 2 years earlier as research

forester and remote sensing scientist for the PNW Station at the Andrews LTER

site.47 By 1991, Cohen was already leading a landscape-scale study of forest dynamics with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) collaborators.

Together, this interagency group analyzed landscape changes over previous decades for a range of federal and private ownerships, with particular emphasis on

cutting and regrowth rates and changes in landscape and habitat structure. Cohen

also worked with Harmon and Ferrell in a NASA-sponsored project with a regional

focus and with multiagency support from National Science Foundations (NSF),

PNW Station, OSU, and the National Forest System. Together, they explored relations between land use and carbon sequestration and release to the atmosphere in

chronological context. Other regional-scale and landscape-scale projects involving

people associated with the Cascade Center by that time included studies of forest

distribution and change for the state of Oregon, regional biodiversity as characterized through data collected for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Gap Analysis”

project, riparian network studies, and forest dynamics research. Among the many

principal investigators and cooperators working on these regional- and landscapescale efforts, leading figures guiding the Andrews group in these studies included

Cissel, Gregory, McKee, Swanson, Grant, Jones, Harr, Lattin, Moldenke, Franklin,

and Spies. Forest dynamics research included biodiversity studies of plant and

invertebrate species in aquatic, riparian, and upland systems across spatial and

successional scales; analysis of forest-opening edges to evaluate effects on microclimate and vegetation; and landscape modeling to examine effects of alternative

cutting patterns over several rotations for areas of 10,000 to 30,000 acres. Riparian

network research included studies of riparian-zone structure, function, and management for water quality, wildlife, and other values; studies of the hydrologic

effects of forestry practices in large basins on peak and low flows from long-term

streamflow records in basins with contrasting cutting and roading histories; and a

47 Interview with John Cissel, 15-16; “H.J. Andrews LTER4 1996-2002 Proposal,”

Section 8, 5.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

284

multibasin study on the effects of forestry practices on stream and riparian resources in a sampling of large basins, including inventories of fish, geomorphology,

and other variables.48

By the time the Northwest Forest Plan initiative got underway in 1993, scientists and managers with the group had aggressively linked previous work at the

Andrews with studies that took a broad-scale approach. The people leading those

efforts could inform but not control the administrative effort to develop a regional

response to the land use issues and socioeconomic concerns relating to spotted

owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Although some of them invested a disproportionate amount of their time, energy, and professional reputations in that administrative effort, others continued ongoing studies on and off the experimental forest.

Andrews group alums Franklin, Sedell, and Meslow participated in the President’s

Forest Conference in Portland on 2 April 1993, and other scientists and managers

affiliated with the group—notably Swanson, Grant, Spies, and Cissel—reported

later that week at the regular LTER-Cascade Center meeting that they had begun

working on postconference activities. Those attending that monthly meeting of the

group also discussed the results of a workshop on ecosystem management that

attracted more than 200 participants from the Willamette and Siuslaw National

Forests, and they planned improvements for a similar meeting scheduled the

following week for participants from the Gifford Pinchot and Mount Hood National

Forests.49

Those working on the Northwest Forest Plan in the spring of 1993 may

have initially expected a 60-day commitment to follow up on the results of the

President’s conference, but the process predictably stretched far beyond that

optimistic timeframe, culminating in a forest management plan completed on

13 April 1994. The grueling process produced a document that claimed to incorporate “nearly 110,000 public comments.” No single voice, consequently, could have

prominent, or even dominant authority in that context. Given the diversity of concerns that produced the presidential initiative in the first place, the final report could

not take the form of an idealized and pristine scientific proposal and still remain true

to the principle of collaborative engagement across diverse political interests. For

48 For a more complete listing of participants, see the Cascade Center Briefing

Documents appended to the meeting minutes. Minutes for the LTER-Cascade Center

meeting (20 September 1991).

49 Minutes for the LTER-Cascade Center meeting (9 April 1993).
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

285

scientists and managers engaged in that effort, the process required personal and

professional commitment that mushroomed well out of proportion to their actual

influence over the final product.50

People working on the Northwest Forest Plan brought new insights back to

the Andrews group. At the group’s September 1993 meeting, Swanson and

Bormann, together with District Rangers Don Gonzales (Hebo Ranger District) and

Burditt, presented the concept of adaptive management areas (AMAs) as proposed

in “option 9” from the presidential planning process. This planning alternative was

eventually adopted as the primary basis for the Northwest Forest Plan in its final

form early the next year. Those who attended that meeting learned that the Central

Cascades AMA, a 155,700-acre zone centered on the Andrews and Blue River

Ranger District, was one of 10 proposed areas in the plan. Subsequent discussion

at that meeting left some “general impressions” that no one was really in charge at

the higher levels, that the rules for the AMAs were unclear, and that the entire

concept could be “rendered useless by legal-judicial or other higher-level decisions.” Those concerns fit perfectly with the group’s earlier strategy of taking

initiative in a zone where lines of authority were still in dispute. The conclusion

of the group’s discussion was a succinct “go for it.”51

Those who attended the Cascade Center-Andrews LTER meeting of 4 March

1994 planned an agenda that demonstrated the group’s activist approach to shaping

the local course of pending implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. Anticipating the final report on a presidential planning process with which leaders of the

group were intimately involved, people in that regular meeting discussed plans for

an “adaptive management workshop” for “scientists, citizens, OSU students, and

state and federal agency folks.” They compiled and presented a list of studies connected with the Andrews-Cascade Center “that involve analysis of ecosystems and

social systems at landscape to regional scale.” They also discussed plans for an

NSF proposal to “Regionalize” LTER work with an emphasis on areas of landscape dynamics in response to wildfire and land use, changes in carbon stores,

hydrology, and biodiversity.” The group planned the proposal to include areas

ranging from the central Cascades study area to the western halves of Oregon

and Washington.52

50 Tuchmann, Connaughton, Freedman, and Moriwaki, “The Northwest Forest Plan: a

Report to the President and Congress,” 2, 116.

51 Minutes of the Cascade Center-Andrews LTER meeting (10 September 1993).

52 Minutes of the Cascade Center-Andrews LTER meeting (4 March 1994).

The Cascade

Center-Andrews

LTER meeting of 4

March 1994 demonstrated the group’s

activist approach

to shaping the local

course of pending

implementation of

the Northwest Forest Plan.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

286

In the 20 months after the Northwest Forest Plan was finalized, the Andrews

Forest and the Blue River Ranger District buzzed with efforts to implement the

155,700-acre Central Cascades AMA mandated in that document. That work preoccupied many people in the group, and it substantially increased the administrative

burden confronting Swanson, McKee, Burditt, and Cissel. Field trips, interagency

communication efforts, a research and learning assessment, watershed analyses,

community strategic planning, watershed council collaboration, and implementing

an ecosystem workforce demonstration crew linked with the Jobs in the Woods

program were among the accomplishments the group reported for that year in the

Central Cascades AMA.53

The plan placed the Andrews Forest at the center of a larger network of AMAs

and, in that way, refocused attention on the experimental forest as an arena for

collaborative engagement among scientists and forest managers. Cissel cites this

development as among the most significant turning points for the group during his

tenure at Blue River. He suggests, however, that the Northwest Forest Plan embraced a planning structure with shortcomings that became evident shortly after it

was adopted: “The Northwest Forest Plan put matrix [lands] and riparian reserves

all over the landscape.” The problems apparent in the reserve system, Cissel

argues, are more than academic. Regional concerns are more seamless than the

neat categories suggested by the mosaic of different use areas laid out in the plan,

and that reality cracked the edifice of the Northwest Forest Plan almost before

the ink dried on the agreement. The reserves were based on a strategy of partitioning the landscape to set aside some lands while managing other lands for timber

production. By contrast, the landscape management concepts in the Augusta Creek

Plan began with the premise that the landscape functions as an integral whole, it

could be managed on a more integrated basis, and the history of landscape change

can guide management of future conditions. The Northwest Forest Plan adopted

watersheds as the fundamental building block of the proposal, and it designated

conservation and reserve areas based on watersheds with the most valuable oldgrowth forests and salmon stocks. Activities were to be carefully circumscribed

on the reserves, where the primary purpose of any thinning or salvage activities

would be to “accelerate the development of old-growth conditions.” In addition,

53 Tuchmann, Connaughton, Freedman, and Moriwaki, “The Northwest Forest Plan: a

Report to the President and Congress,” 118.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

287

the plan designated 10 AMAs of 78,000 to 380,000 acres open to “intensive ecological experimentation and social innovation to develop and demonstrate new

ways to integrate ecological and economic objectives.”54

The Northwest Forest Plan imposed significant constraints on forest lands

outside the AMAs, but in doing so, it also tended to refocus the group’s attention

on the Andrews Forest and the Central Cascades AMA centered there. Landscape

studies at the Augusta Creek site, for example, were outside the boundaries of the

AMA. When proposed management activities related to those studies conflicted

with guidelines from the Northwest Forest Plan, the obvious solution was to move

the studies back to Blue River, within the AMA, where the additional benefits of

long-term monitoring would also enhance the effort. The district was ready to do a

timber sale at Augusta Creek, but it was managed according to a strategy different

from the Northwest Forest Plan, including “intensive timber management.” The

group rapidly adapted to that decision, redesigning the study as a landscape plan

for the Blue River watershed. It had taken years to get the Augusta Creek Project

“tuned” to the point where the group “felt pretty good about it.” The Blue River

watershed was three times the size of the Augusta Creek drainage, but the group

took concepts from the Augusta Project and used them to develop a landscape plan

for the Blue River watershed in 2 weeks.55

Ecosystem Management and the Andrews Group

The Blue River landscape management strategy was still the focus of discussion

for Andrews group participants who attended the monthly meeting in March 1998.

Briefing materials for that discussion described the Blue River Landscape Project,

beginning 17 April 1997, as an “untested approach to meeting the objectives of the

Northwest Forest Plan.” The project, according to this discussion, was based on

the premise that productive ecosystems and native species likely would be sustained if ecological processes followed historical patterns. As that briefing document cautions, however, “the degree to which management activities, such as

timber harvest and prescribed fire, can approximate historical disturbance regimes

is not yet clear.” Citing the advantages of working on a landscape subject to continuous study for nearly 50 years, the briefing laid out the theoretical framework

of a monitoring effort organized along a “hierarchy of spatial scales.” It cited the

54 Tuchmann, Connaughton, Freedman, and Moriwaki, “The Northwest Forest Plan: a

Report to the President and Congress,” 233-236; interview with John Cissel, 15, 18.

55 Interview with John Cissel, 17.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

288

mission of the Andrews Forest as a site supporting research and educational purposes, with a humanized landscape of experimental watersheds, plots, monitoring

stations, and control areas that collectively “cover virtually all of the Andrews.” It

noted more than 100 projects currently active at the Andrews Forest, with major

support from the LTER program. It characterized the place as one of 18 LTER

sites representing different ecosystems throughout the United States and Antarctica,

and it noted project-specific grants linking the Andrews Forest with the National

Forest System, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Physical improvements emphasized in this briefing document included 3 dormitories capable

of housing up to 60 people, a new office and laboratory building, and the pending

completion of a new class and conference room “suitable for groups of up to 100

people.”56

Those who attended the group’s March 1998 meeting received a short history

of the “emphasis and scope of the research program on the Andrews” as part of

their briefing materials. According to this document, research at the Andrews began

with an “initial emphasis [in the 1950s] ... to learn how to convert old forests to

new forests in an efficient manner,” then “shifted in the 1960s to look at the effects

of forest cutting,” while the 1970s “ushered in a new era of ecosystem science,

focused initially on old-growth forests.” That emphasis on ecosystem science, the

1997 briefing document asserted, “continues today.” Following that assertion, the

document listed a catalogue of study themes: structure and composition of forest

communities, vertebrates and invertebrates inhabiting the forest, aquatic ecology,

decomposition, nutrient cycles, long-term ecosystem productivity, disturbance

patterns, fungi, lichens, and relations among these features of the ecosystem.

Finally, the proposal laid out three landscape areas in the landscape management

strategy with the goal of developing different densities of trees, and identified

priorities for monitoring at the scale of the entire watershed, subwatersheds, small

streams, and local sites.

In addition to the close focus on the attributes of the Andrews Forest, the

Blue River Landscape monitoring strategy also emphasized the broader context

of the facility in relation to surrounding administrative units. It noted the linkage

of the Andrews Forest and the Three Sisters Wilderness as a Biosphere Reserve,

and proximity of the Andrews to matrix and riparian reserves designated under the

Northwest Forest Plan. It also emphasized the proximity of the experimental forest

56 “Blue River Landscape Monitoring Strategy, 4/18/97” as presented at the 6 March

1998 LTER/Cascade Center meeting.
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to “large blocks of industrial forest lands ... a short distance to the west of Blue

River watershed.”57 It was just one among many examples of the drastically

fragmented and partitioned, forested landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Rather

than emphasizing the relatively pristine characteristics of the Andrews Forest that

predominated in earlier depictions of this facility, the briefing document emphasized

the “made” landscape of the place in the context of other managed landscapes in

the Pacific Northwest. The group perceived these “second nature” characteristics,

by the late 1990s, as attributes exceeding the importance of the “pristine nature”

previously emphasized in promotional materials and proposals centered on the

Andrews Forest.

Conclusion

Leaders of the group during the late 1990s retained the diffuse traditions of earlier

years, while adapting their focus to more contemporary issues. The Cascade

Center provided an administrative identity for collaborative efforts among people

affiliated with the Willamette National Forest, PNW Station, and OSU. Monthly

LTER/Cascade Center meetings, meanwhile, provided an ongoing venue for individual engagement with the group and for encouraging marginally involved participants to work more closely with that community. Beyond these structural issues,

however, people associated with the Andrews increasingly identified with a common philosophical outlook. They synthesized and restated earlier, often unarticulated traditions of collaboration, long-term commitment, and applied theory. The

concept of ecosystem management emerged as a critical, integrative theme. Members of the group advanced the concept as they conscientiously contributed their

time to the process of devising the Northwest Forest Plan. By the end of the decade, it was a more carefully articulated philosophy shaping the self-identity and

community priorities of the Andrews group. Leading scientists affiliated with the

group described ecosystem management in a 1997 paper as an “emerging concept

... [that] carries with it a gestalt of holism rather than reductionism, a subordination of human desires to ecosystem health, and recognition of a broader range

of values in ecosystems than past practices have acknowledged.” Although the

group’s work largely focused on forest lands, the authors emphasized that ecosystem management also works with landscapes other than forests. They explored the

relation between concepts of processes perceived as “natural,” such as disturbance

57 “Blue River Landscape Monitoring Strategy, 4/18/97,” 2-6.

The Cascade Center

provided an administrative identity

for collaborative

efforts among

people affiliated

with the Willamette

National Forest,

PNW Station, and

OSU.
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events, and the concept of ecosystem management. They cautioned, however that

ecosystem management requires more than simply attempting to mimic such

“natural disturbance” events, noting the relatively “fine-grained mosaic of older,

often uneven-aged, forest patches.” Rethinking earlier notions of “scientific forestry” they concluded that ecosystem management is “more than science,” and

they restated an apparently obvious, but frequently ignored point: “Social responsibility, economic feasibility, political acceptability—all will shape the management

paradigm that leads to ecological sustainability. Land management is not a scientific

process. Though it should incorporate scientific ideas and information, it inevitably

reflects substantial elements of consensus and compromise. ...” Ultimately,

Swanson and his coauthors suggested, ecosystem management builds from the

philosophy that ecosystem scientists “must be prepared to create and accept roles

in the management process.”58

58 Ken Lertzman, Tom Spies, and Fred Swanson, “From Ecosystem Dynamics to

Ecosystem Management.” In: The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American

Bioregion, Peter K. Schoonmaker, Bettina von Hagen, and Edward C. Wolf, eds.

(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997), 361-382.
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Chapter Eight: Managing Data and Building a

Collective Memory of Science Through Time

By the end of the 20th century, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews

Forest) was as much an idea as a place. Scientists and forest managers went

there to look for answers to problems they found in other landscapes. As one

scientist explained in a 1997 interview, “Ultimately we would like all the work at

the Andrews to ... [say] something about fundamental processes rather than processes at the Andrews.”1

 The Andrews group tended to attract and recruit people

who similarly viewed the forest as a place to seek answers applicable elsewhere.

For more than 50 years, scientists and managers idealized that place as a setting

where they could test their ideas about science in relation to management policy.

Over several decades, the Andrews group carefully integrated years of carefully

maintained data into shared information management systems. In that way, they

linked individual effort with broader themes and networks that bridged local,

regional, national, and international boundaries. During the 1990s, people in the

group worked to integrate this continuous stream of scientific data from multiple

threads of research into focused, collaborative action. That process built on several

decades of innovation in information management that transformed the way scientists communicated ideas, insights, and results. In that context, the group combined insights about ecosystem dynamics with principles of adaptive management

to attempt ecosystem management on a landscape scale in neighboring drainages.

Their effort to implement ecosystem management on a landscape scale was

more an act of self-realization than of sudden inspiration for the group. What

seemed natural in the group eventually became their preferred strategy for managing the landscape centering their community. The place inspired new ideas, but

ideas also inspired human actions that transformed the Andrews. In less than 50

years, the forest Roy Silen once perceived as a “forest primeval” was roaded and

logged more intensely than neighboring drainages. In the last third of the century,

however, the Lookout Creek drainage was relatively isolated from timber production on nearby slopes. As a result, by the end of the century, the Andrews once

again seemed “pristine,” at least by comparison with clearcut slopes on the surrounding national forest and private forest lands. The group’s perceptions of the

1

 Interviews with Gordon Grant by Max Geier on 6 and 10 October 97 at the FSL,

Corvallis, OR, as transcribed by Elizabeth Foster, 26-27.
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place moved through three distinct phases in less than 50 years: virgin timber, managed forest stands, and pristine ecosystem. In the late 1990s, the group introduced

a fourth stage: managed ecosystem and managed landscapes. They expected that

human activity would, thereafter, regulate that forest’s ecological processes.2

Data Management: Institutionalizing a Collective Memory of

Research and Community

The Andrews community attracted many different people for reasons unique to

each individual, but at the end of the 20th century, it acted as a group that was more

than the sum of its parts. The ongoing effort to manage five decades of data from

the Andrews Forest reinforced that characteristic of the group. That data represented the collective memory of the Andrews, and it was an important component

of the community. It attracted people to the group, it inspired new ideas, and it

enticed people to stay with the Andrews. Julia Jones, for example, joined the group

in the 1990s because she was convinced those data were “the best records” available for exploring “how hydrologic systems really work in practice.” During the

last two decades of the century, the group systematized and professionalized its

stewardship of long-term records from the Andrews. The person who headed that

effort was Susan Stafford, who joined the Oregon State University (OSU) faculty

in 1979. Her accomplishments perhaps best represent the aspirations of the group

for long-term stability and continuity. She guided an evolving system for maintaining and analyzing data, beginning with just one programmer in 1979. By 1998, her

data management group had developed a Forest Science Data Bank that was a

prototype for Web-based data sharing among the various Long Term Ecological

Research (LTER) sites. Stafford’s central role in building this prototype system also

demonstrates the importance of OSU as an institutional framework for faculty and

staff whose work as university employees and in campus facilities had supported

the group effort at the Andrews Forest over the long term, since the early days of

the International Biological Programme (IBP).3

The Andrews group of the late 1990s was a data-based, science-oriented,

place-centered, and people-friendly community. People made it work, and the data

2

 For a brief, accessible introduction to the concept of ecosystem management, see Ken

Lertzman, Tom Spies, and Fred Swanson, “From Ecosystem Dynamics to Ecosystem

Management.” In: Peter K. Schoonmaker, Bettina von Hagen, and Edward C. Wolf, eds.,

The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bioregion (Washington, DC:

Island Trust, 1997), 361-382.

3

 Interview with Julia Jones, 6; interview with Susan Stafford, 15; communication from

Logan Norris to Fred Swanson 9 September 2003.
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Figure 52—Data management at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest was a

continuing legacy and established foundation, but with the technological boom

of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Andrews group transformed the concept of

data management into an organizing principle of the research community. This

series of photographs illustrates the rapidly evolving, technological framework

that the Andrews group adapted to their purposes in those decades. New

technology also created problems of long-term archiving of records collected in

multiple, mutually incompatible formats, ranging from computer punch-cards,

to computer tapes, to zip disks, to digital memory sticks. Gaging stations and

other field equipment generated continuous, graphical output in hard-copy

formats that varied over time. These multiple formats challenged data

managers, who constantly innovated new approaches to making the evergrowing mountain of data accessible and secure as an ongoing legacy of the

Andrews group.

Suzanne Remillard and Don Henshaw
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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system that helped them work together followed the organized principles of its

founder. Stafford, who decorated her well-ordered office with sailing paraphernalia,

often used nautical terms to explain a system for managing data that represented

ecological processes on a forested landscape. Like many others active in the group

near the end of the 20th century, she is a native of the Northeastern United States.

She graduated from Syracuse University in New York (SUNY) in 1974, with an

undergraduate degree in biology and an emphasis in mathematics. She earned a

masters degree in quantitative ecology from SUNY in 1975, producing a thesis

that tested computer models of commercial fishery stocks against archival records

of fish populations on the Great Lakes. Stafford’s thesis for the Ph.D. in applied

statistics at SUNY in 1979, involved a model she developed for determining land

values of forest and vacant lands in three counties in upstate New York. She explains of her graduate work, “I like to figure out how to bring an organizational

arrangement to something to make it facilitate and expedite what we’re all about.”4

Stafford’s philosophy of applied statistics guided the forest science community

in Corvallis, Oregon, through nearly 20 years of evolving sophistication in thinking

about the way they generated, used, and stored research data. She applied for an

opening at OSU in 1979 on the advice of her major professor at SUNY, and continued in that position through 1998, when she left to accept an appointment as Chair

of the Department of Forest Science at Colorado State University. In the intervening years, the Andrews group generated a mushrooming volume and variety of

data, and demands from scientists for access to those data increased exponentially.

Stafford’s unit grew in tandem with the research program. Technology, as well as

ideas, shaped the direction of the group’s collective memory. They started with a

mainframe computer, and then made the transition to personal computers (PCs)

not connected to each other. As the group struggled with that atomized computing

environment, Stafford linked them together in a local area network (LAN), and in

1987, she drafted a proposal for National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to

develop a data management system for the LTER.5

Stafford’s proposal to NSF, which she wrote in collaboration with Sollins,

Swanson, and Gregory outlined a strategy for creating an “integrated science

workbench for ecosystem research.” It proposed to provide online access to the

4

 Interview with Susan Stafford, 16.

5

 Interview with Susan Stafford, 16; H.J. Andrews LTER-Cascade Center for Ecosystem

Management meeting notes (1 May 1998); communication from Fred Swanson August

1999.

Stafford’s philosophy of applied statistics guided the

forest science community in Corvallis,

Oregon, through

nearly 20 years.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

295

group’s data, including high-resolution graphics and computing power. Stafford’s

unit began with one workstation, and expanded to a system of 44 workstations and

a local area network linking the PCs to the Forest Science Data Bank. One year

later, Stafford led a collaborative effort that involved Bill Ripple, of the Environmental Remote Sensing and Application (ERSA) Laboratory, and many other people in

the Andrews group on a proposal to link geographical information system (GIS)

with remote sensing. That effort eventually connected the ERSA Laboratory to the

Forest Science LAN. The proposal also secured “seed money” for hiring Barbara

Marks as a support programmer. That funding was the first time Stafford was able

to secure money from NSF to fund a person, rather than purchase hardware or

software. The funding from NSF to support expenditures on staff and equipment

for managing data generated by the LTER program set a precedent that helped

Stafford secure other funds.6

The move to Web-based technology placed the group at the leading edge of

some critical LTER initiatives. As a prototype site for the LTER, the Andrews group

accepted the responsibility for testing new ideas and sharing the results with other

sites in that network. Stafford approached data management at the Andrews with

an appreciation for the group’s potential for growth and its role as a model for

other LTER programs. Beginning with the 1988 grant proposal, Stafford designed

a system of data management that assumed the group “was always going to be

growing.” Growth accelerated during the 1990s, and computing needs grew accordingly. By 1994, people in the group were working with about 180 PCs. A year

later, they had 280 PCs, and by 1998, about 500 PCs. The technology of data management also changed rapidly in that period, moving from paper documentation

on data-entry forms to a tape library with automated access, to the LAN that

included the Forest Science Data Bank and Web-based access by the late 1990s.

The group’s status as a flagship program in the area of information management

helped them assemble a critical mass of technical experts more quickly, and act

as an integrated unit. The Forest Science Data Bank also expanded beyond the

Andrews program, providing data management services that supported other

programs within and beyond the university by the late 1990s.7

6

 Interview with Susan Stafford, 3-5.

7

 Interview with Susan Stafford, 6; communication from Fred Swanson October 2003.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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In funding Stafford’s grant proposal, the NSF required the Andrews group

to “be a prototype in this regard,” and that edict transformed the Andrews LTER

workplace. It became, thereafter, a site for exploring new methods of data management, and the effort to maintain a Web presence opened those methods to

scrutiny by people at other LTER sites and at other research organizations in the

United States and in other countries. That reality forced the group into the arena

of international relations as their research, and international interest in that research,

brought them into contact with people making policy decisions and leading research

initiatives around the world. Stafford and the group developed mechanisms for data

sharing, storage, and analysis, to make data from research projects at the Andrews

available more rapidly and to more people outside that community. Stafford balanced the NSF mandate to “have as much data online as possible as quickly as

possible” against the rights of scientists to protect their intellectual property. Some

sites in the LTER network made a distinction between their core data sets from the

five major areas of work assigned to scientists in the program and the work assigned to their graduate students. The Andrews group, however, minimized that

distinction and emphasized the importance and long-term potential of the work

assigned to graduate students. Stafford’s unit, therefore, designed a form to standardize the structure of their data, and worked with graduate students as well as

program scientists to prepare their data in a format compatible with the Forest

Science Data Bank. By the late 1990s, the group had either placed its data online

in that format, or placed abstracts online for data that were only available in other

Figure 53—Susan Stafford, seen here addressing

the Information Management Executive Committee

at San Diego Super Computer Center in 2002,

guided the Andrews group through the technological maze of the 1990s and built a data management

system that became a model for other Long Term

Ecological Research sites across the country.

Stafford balanced

the NSF mandate

to “have as much

data online as possible as quickly as

possible” against

the rights of scientists to protect their

intellectual property.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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formats. These accomplishments only partially achieved the goals Stafford and

others in the group intended, but they were nonetheless “pioneer” or “test cases

for new ways of doing science.”8

The effort to manage data was an integrative, adaptive strategy that linked

university and agency scientists in the group with each other and with a global

network of colleagues. The Quantitative Scientists group and the Forest Science

Data Bank joined the emerging global network,9

 and that linkage further blurred

the distinction between Forest Service and Forest Science data and people in the

group. It also blurred the distinction between scientists and data managers. People

who worked in Stafford’s unit served in a consulting, collegial role rather than

as gatekeepers to the world of data management. Everyone who worked with

Stafford in the Quantitative Services group had at least some training in the biological sciences or in natural resources in addition to their technical skills in data management. They participated in the monthly LTER meetings, and they worked as

8

 Interview with Susan Stafford, 3-4; communication from Fred Swanson August 1999.

9

 Interview with Susan Stafford, 1.

Figure 54—Under the leadership of Susan Stafford and Don Henshaw, the Data

Management component of the Andrews group was increasingly prominent in

the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. This photo of the LTER

Information Management Executive Committee on the San Diego State Campus

in 2002 includes (from left) Emery Boose, Peter McCartney, Helena Karasti,

John Anderson, Kristin Vanderbilt, Barbara Benson, Susan Stafford, James

Brunt, Karen Baker, John Porter, and Don Henshaw.
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collaborating consultants who understood the science goals, the potential implications of the data, and the importance of the work to the lives and ambitions of the

scientists.10

The Andrews group worked to build its philosophy of “breaking down barriers” into the structure of data management. Stafford’s goal was to “foster the

idea that data management might be integrated into that whole research process.”

Toward that end, her unit devised a systematic procedure that specified distinct

phases for designing and implementing a research plan. In the first phase, the

Principal Investigator (PI) and associated researchers met with a statistician to

identify and define the objectives of the research. They next met with a data

manager to plan a format for the data that would be appropriate for long-term,

archival storage in the Forest Science Data Bank. Then they implemented the study

and began collecting data according to plan. Subsequent steps in the data management process required working with researchers on documenting and editing the

data records, then analyzing, interpreting, and synthesizing the data. At the synthesis stage, field workers met with a statistician who helped them interpret the results to ensure statistically sound reasoning. The prominent nature of work at

the Andrews in the late 20th century encouraged the group to adopt this model

of structured data management because the potential for controversial findings

or critical audiences was so great. Statistical rigor was a refuge from politically

inspired criticism. The structured approach also supported and sustained the

group’s efforts to initiate and continue long-term scientific research. The systematic procedures that Stafford devised helped scientists structure their studies so that

the boundary conditions, or limits of the work, were clearly stated up front—

before the conclusions. In that way, they attempted to defuse some potential

criticism by anticipating and acknowledging the limitations of their work. This front

work also promoted more efficient study designs that ensured research efforts

would generate data in formats useful and relevant to the concerns that prompted

the work.11

The Human Variable: Fitting In and Winnowing Out at the

Andrews

Stafford’s unit supported efforts to systematize the work of the Andrews group,

but human resources followed a more complex and less formalized logic than data

10 Interview with Susan Stafford, 2-3.

11 Interview with Susan Stafford, 3-4.
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sets and computer networks. People were, nonetheless, an introduced and managed

variable on the Andrews Forest by the end of the century. The group usually did

not consciously select people who could join them in that place, but everyone who

came to the Andrews survived an unconscious process of social selection, following a combination of personal and institutional decisions. Some, like Roy Silen in

the earliest years of the experimental forest, had virtually no control over the

process that brought them to or wrenched them away from this place. Others

participated more directly in the decisions leading to their association with it. In

more recent years, people associated with the Andrews commonly express their

belief that “self selection” mostly determined who joined and stayed with this community. Actual mechanisms of recruitment, however, were often more complex

than that phrase might suggest. Gordon Grant, for example, secured his permanent

position with the Forest Service Research organization in the mid 1980s after

working with the group for several years as a graduate student on soft-money

funding. From his perspective, he simply “showed up” as a graduate student and

worked his way—through his own actions—into a permanent position in the group.

When a search opened, Dennis Harr asked Grant what he thought the person hired

should do, and Grant responded, “Well, I don’t know, something about mountain

rivers.” That roughly described Grant’s emerging specialization. He explained his

engagement with the group as an example of natural selection in a human context: “When you’re early on in a group, a lot of your struggle is ... to define that

turf or define that domain. ... There is a lot of niche selection going on, ... it’s an

ecosystem.”12

One characteristic of belonging to this group, by the 1990s, was to speak of

how it functioned as if it really were an ecological, or natural organism. Whether

or not the analogy to evolutionary processes accurately described how things

actually worked in this human assemblage, people found their niche in the group

by fitting their skills to the needs of the community, as more established members

defined those needs. Sometimes that meant the new member alerted the group to a

previously unrecognized need. In the five decades after the Forest Service established the experimental forest, people drawn to the place typically followed a route

through several distinct stages of personal development related to their eventual

role with the Andrews group. Those stages included (not necessarily in this order)

12 H.J. Andrews LTER-Cascade Center for Ecosystem Management meeting notes

(1 May 1998); interview with Gordon Grant, 12-13.
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personal inclination, academic and career training, professional experience, discovery (of the place), inquiry (into opportunity), funding (locating and securing),

mobilization (personal and professional), and socialization into the group. Individual

will was not necessarily sufficient for involvement.

The particular pathway by which each member of the group came to the

Andrews was unique, but most people were attracted to the community and its

accomplishments more than the place. Personal relations and professional networks were especially important during the stages of discovery, inquiry, funding,

mobilization, and socialization, and they were often contingent on earlier stages

of training and experience. Some experiences and affiliations were especially

crucial. People like M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman, Jerry Franklin, Art McKee, and

Fred Swanson, for example, mentored or otherwise influenced many people who

eventually converged at the Andrews Forest in the last three decades of the 20th

century. Experiences at major research centers like Oak Ridge, Woods Hole,

Luquillo, and Coweeta helped people develop contacts with other scientists and

managers who traveled in the same professional circles as those who worked at

the Andrews. Experiences at particular universities, notably including the University

of Tennessee, Pennsylvania State University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Georgia, or OSU served a similar function. Access to these networks of

affiliation increased the likelihood a person would eventually become involved and

secure long-term tenure with the group. People who developed a long-term involvement with that community, however, also needed a local network of support

among people already working at the Andrews.

New recruits could choose to participate in any of several structured opportunities for communicating with other scientists and managers in the group. The

monthly LTER meetings and the annual field gathering, HJA Daze, for example,

encouraged precisely those kinds of linkages. People learned to recognize subtle

signs that they were accepted in the group: they were invited to participate in

events, they were accepted as legitimate participants when they showed up in

group venues to which they were not directly invited, or they were given time on

the agenda at field demonstrations or at the regular monthly meetings. That “face

time” demonstrated their status in the group more than it offered an opportunity for

gaining acceptance. Informal exchanges during field events were more important

than going to formal meetings for those who hoped to elevate their standing with

the group. People talked to each other while riding to and from the Andrews Forest

Experiences at

major research

centers like Oak

Ridge, Woods

Hole, Luquillo, and

Coweeta helped

people develop

contacts with other

scientists and managers who worked

at the Andrews.
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and during excursions on that landscape. Acceptance, for some, also meant giving

up habits learned in graduate school: they had to think beyond their own research

and consider their personal and professional responsibility to the group.13

The emphasis on community was an important factor determining success at

the Andrews and in the group. The experimental forest both attracted and repelled

people, depending on their personal disposition toward the community culture of

the group. Waring, who led the Andrews effort during the IBP, later distanced

himself from that community because he was no longer comfortable working

in a group context. A few people left because the group informally rejected them.

In the words of one leader, some people “tried to get into the group” but failed to

gain acceptance because others in that community considered them money hounds

who wouldn’t participate in meetings or other functions of the group. People who

“just wanted the money,” and “didn’t want any strings attached to it” just “didn’t

work out.”14

The point in their career at which people joined the group was also a factor in

their decision to stick. At various times, Forest Service professionals, university

professors, postdoctoral research assistants, technicians, graduate students, and

undergraduate assistants found the group supportive and welcoming. It was a

community of structured instability: many short-term associates ebbed and flowed

around a smaller core of more secure, longer term associates. Their involvement

with more-transient people who contributed new ideas and skills also helped people

with more-permanent tenure link their work with more-contemporary ideas and

insights. The makeup of that less-mobile core also changed with retirements, transfers, and new, permanent hires. The small cohort of long-term associates anchored

core values for a group that studiously avoided defining itself, even as it earned a

reputation for principled innovation and responsiveness to the shifting tides of

public interest and management needs.

The characteristic fluidity and informality of the group was also a response

to the limits of institutional funding through PNW Station, OSU, and the Willamette

National Forest, and it demonstrates how the group’s close connections with

the NSF and its institutional culture began to affect how people interacted at the

Andrews. By the late 1990s, Andrews-affiliated scientists who accepted shortterm appointments at NSF were infusing insights from that experience back to

the group. Entomologist Tim Schowalter, for example, was a tenured member of

13 Interview with Gordon Grant, 13-14.

14 Interview with Mark Harmon, 19.
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the OSU faculty who worked with the Andrews group before and after his appointment as program director for ecosystem studies at NSF in 1992 and 1993. At that

agency, he was one of many program directors who rotated through on short-term

appointments. He observed how he and his temporary colleagues in Washington,

D.C., introduced the smaller cadre of permanent NSF staff to current ideas and

problems that researchers then faced in the field. From that experience, he learned

how a small group of permanent staff could influence the decisions that more permanent colleagues made. He also learned, however, that people with short tenure,

like himself, relied on people with longer tenure to supply continuity, stability, and a

sense of what had been tried before.15 When he returned to Corvallis, those insights

informed Schowalter’s actions in the group.

Personality and the Limits of Organic Community

People in the Andrews group tended to explain the functioning of that community

in terms they borrowed from their studies of natural processes, and that tendency

complicated their efforts to understand why they were successful. The group depended on people who could cooperate with other professionals while applying

their own training and skills to achieve common goals. They needed people with

adaptive and accommodating personalities, who also had relevant training, background, and experience. In the late 1990s, few people in the group could articulate a clear strategy for recruiting and retaining people with those characteristics.

Many of them, however, embraced the ideal of a self-regulating, naturally adjusting, organic community. That concept suited their need to remain flexible, adaptive, and responsive in the tumultuous political environment of the 1990s, but it also

freed them from the responsibility of critically examining their existing mechanisms

of recruitment. It was, moreover, a vague and incomplete description of how and

why new people typically joined and functioned in the group during that decade.

The group based its reputation and programs on an institutionalized system of

structured instability: It relied on short-term, “soft-money” appointments to support

long-term studies. That structure forced many people in the group to constantly

consider other career options, and many of them left the Andrews community. Few

of the people who helped plan and implement long-term studies remained with the

group for more than a few years, but some did. It was a system that placed the

burden of an uncertain future on individual people, and that uncertainty sometimes

15 Interview with Tim Schowalter, 2, 17, 19-20.
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strained relations in the group. Recruitment, retention, and departure proceeded

with little formal discussion about who or how to recruit or how to encourage

long-term tenure. The group relied, instead, on a process with the outward appearance of unstructured informality. The result, intended or not, was that group

leaders avoided taking responsibility for the scope, purpose, profile, and inner

workings of the community. Things just happened “naturally,” and individual access to funding largely depended on each person’s ability to identify and occupy

an unchallenged niche with functional utility to the group.

People who wanted to participate in the group had to secure a consensus of

support from other people in that community, with virtually no help from a more

systematic structure of authority. The ability to do that was a critical factor of

what some people in the Andrews community termed “self-selection,” but in

fact, it amounted to selection by an undefined group of people. In one example,

Harmon recalls he disagreed with another scientist on how to develop an NSF

grant to support water balance and nutrient studies at the Andrews Forest. That

disagreement led to a personality conflict, and the two scientists “just did not get

along.” Eventually, other scientists whose appointments depended on grant money

“lost confidence” that the other alternative would continue their tenuous funding, and they expressed their support for Harmon’s ideas. Forest managers associated with the group also viewed this process as an example of natural selection.

Eubanks, for example, observed that the “right people moved in and out of there

to the point where you had the right chemistry.” Even if that “self-selection” process did not actively include everyone in the group, Eubanks concluded, “Everybody was welcomed,” and those who were left out of the loop often continued to

participate in other ways.16

People who developed strong personal and professional ties with others in

the group had a better chance of building a consensus of support for their projects

and for securing funds through the Andrews community. In that sense, personality

could be as important as academic qualifications. The vague system of reaching a

group consensus required people to trust an unspecified number of people who

participated in that process, all without technically signing on to any bylaws or

membership agreements. Accepting that system required a leap of faith, and that

was an imposing barrier for anyone who previously experienced or feared discrimination. It was an especially important concern in those periods when people

16 Interview with Steve Eubanks, 15; interview with Gordon Grant, 12-13; interview with

Mark Harmon, 24.

People who developed strong

personal and professional ties with

others in the group

had a better chance

of building a consensus of support

for their projects.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

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could opt for career opportunities in other programs with more structured policies

defining authority and career ladders. The Andrews system required people to trust

the intentions of colleagues, and it tended to attract those with an a-priori reason

to trust others already in the group, either through previous experience or mutual

involvement. However attractive or unattractive the place may have been for

professional reasons, personal relations were critical components of recruitment

and retention in the Andrews community.

Some people first established a place for themselves in the group by demonstrating an ability to “fit in” with a particular person in that community, thereby

earning a chance to develop a niche for themselves. Gabriel Tucker demonstrated

that ability early in his career, establishing connections that enabled him to rejoin

the group at several different points over the span of three decades. His participation spanned various roles and eras, from undergraduate assistant to cooperating

faculty on permanent appointment, and from the IBP through the young-stand

studies of the late 1990s. Throughout, Tucker was closely involved but not a leader

with the group. His career illustrates the convoluted mechanisms that attracted

people to the Andrews Forest, launched them on a career away from it, and

brought them back to the group at a later stage in their lives.

Figure 55—Bill Emmingham took this photo of his graduate advisee, Gabriel

Tucker, working at a field site on Watershed 10 in May 1975 during the International Biological Programme. In the photo, Tucker is changing the chart on

the circular thermograph recorder used to measure soil and air temperature.

Two decades later, Tucker returned to work with the Andrews group.
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A common characteristic that helped people fit in at the Andrews was a

personality shaped by wanderlust, a broad but intense interest in science, and

an outsider’s curiosity about the Northwestern United States. Tucker’s experience followed that common pattern, which in this respect resembled Dyrness’,

McKee’s, and Harmon’s earlier examples. He set out with only a vague interest

in pursuing a career in natural resources and a family heritage of scientific work.

His father was a biochemist, and Tucker aimed to distinguish himself in a different

scientific arena. Like Franklin, he initially saw himself as a forest ranger. He studied

forestry at the University of Pennsylvania, where he did lab work for a professor

who subsequently moved to the University of Arizona. He followed his mentor to

Arizona, helped him set up his lab, and then transferred to OSU, where he enrolled

in the forest science option in the Department of Forest Management. In 1974, his

junior year at OSU, Tucker linked up with Bill Ferrell, who had guided Franklin’s

master’s thesis nearly two decades earlier. Ferrell recommended Tucker for an

assignment with Chuck Grier, who worked with Franklin and Waring on the IBP.

Tucker was technically qualified but had little relevant experience when he interviewed with Grier for a position as a research assistant. He won the job with his

answer to the question, “Do you fly fish?” Tucker, who was not a fisherman,

responded “I can learn fast,” and Grier assigned him to assist Steve Running, a

technician working with Waring.17

Some people were less willing to adapt to the Andrews group than others, and

those with a more independent disposition often sought opportunities elsewhere.

Tucker’s personality suited Running, a loner who avoided the transient research

community centered on the temporary housing known as Gypsy Camp, near the

entrance to the Andrews. Running headed a component of Waring’s work on the

primary production segment of the IBP. That work was intended to develop simulation models relating plant productivity and photosynthesis to the physiological state

of the plant; specifically, to determine whether the plant’s stomates were open or

closed. Tucker spent 2 years (1974-1976) working closely with Running, and

eventually wrote an undergraduate thesis based on his work at the Andrews Forest. That effort largely focused on Watersheds 6, 7, and 8. The first two of these

watersheds were logged in that period, while the third was left uncut as a “control”

in keeping with the paired watersheds research model. Tucker’s field work with

Running on that changing landscape included a series of brief, but focused and

17 Interview with Gabriel Tucker, 1-2.
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307

intense, 15-minute intervals of hard work, interspersed with nearly 2 hours of waiting for the next period of activity. Wherever possible, Running spent that downtime

fly-fishing. He largely avoided contact with other scientists in the group, and he left

near the end of the IBP to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. He eventually secured a faculty appointment at the University of Montana, and by the 1990s,

he was a leading national and international expert in remote sensing and large-scale

modeling.18

Like many of his contemporaries, Tucker traced a circuitous career path that

followed professional networks and funding opportunities back to the Andrews

Forest in the early 1990s, first as a postdoctoral research fellow seeking a funded

position, and subsequently as a cooperating scientist with a faculty appointment

at Evergreen State College in Washington in the latter part of that decade. His

meandering course had much in common with others who joined the group in

the second decade of the LTER. He began with generalized goals, struggled to

find a focus, maintained his personal networks, and ultimately found himself at

the Andrews Forest. He spent 6 years with the Peace Corps in Africa, followed

by 5 years in a Ph.D. program at Cornell University. He returned to the Andrews

in 1991 a married man with kids to support. He needed work, and he applied for a

postdoctoral appointment at OSU. During his hiatus from the group, Tucker kept in

touch with McKee and Running at national meetings of the Ecological Society of

America. Those contacts drew him back to the group, and they continued after his

appointment at Evergreen State College, in 1995. Ultimately, they led to his cooperating role in the uneven-age management study at the Andrews through the end of

that decade.19

Many people who joined the group during the 1990s had previous experience

with other scientists in that community, even if they were not involved in the

Andrews community at the time they met. The ability to initiate and develop close

friendships with other scientists and sustain those relations for long periods and

across great distances was a personality trait common in the group. Julia Jones,

who joined the Andrews community in the same year Tucker returned to OSU

(1991), had similar, pragmatic reasons for that move. She also had previous experience with key people in the group. Her initial involvement at the Andrews

Forest, however, was relatively later in her career, by comparison with Tucker.

A native of Maryland, Jones grew up spending summers at her family’s lakeside

18 Interview with Gabriel Tucker, 2-3; interview with Waring, 3.

19 Interview with Gabriel Tucker, 8-10, 12.
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308

camp in the New Hampshire woods and later earned a bachelor’s degree in economic development at Hampshire College. It was an experimental college, with no

grades or credits. Students completed degrees by negotiating a series of contracts

with individual faculty members. That self-directed experience was good training

for her eventual role at the Andrews. She went overseas to earn a master’s degree

in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International

Studies in Bologna, Italy, and completed a Ph.D. in geography and environmental

engineering at Johns Hopkins University with a study of deforestation in Tanzania.

At Hopkins, Jones worked under the tutelage of the famed geomorphologist,

“Reds” Wolman, and shared an office with fellow graduate student, Gordon

Grant.20 That association, remote from the Andrews Forest, ultimately linked her

with the group.

A few people with no direct role at the Andrews Forest had a major impact on

the character of the community centered on that place, and Wolman was one of

those people. Jones and Grant brought common graduate school experiences, and

the insights they drew from Wolman, to their association at the Andrews Forest.

Those insights included a philosophy of encouraging self-directed, independent

work with minimal oversight, as well as concrete theories about hydrology and

geomorphology. Jones taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara from

1983 through 1991, holding a joint appointment in geography and environmental

studies. Because of her acquaintance with Grant, Jones included examples from

the watershed studies at the Andrews in her course on watershed science at Santa

Barbara. Jones discovered that long-term research at just a few places, including

Hubbard Brook and the Andrews Forest, “dominated” the literature on hydrologic

response and other general watershed topics.21

Family and professional networks brought Jones to Corvallis in the early

1990s, and the promise of funding to pursue research at the Andrews Forest subsequently brought Jones into the group. Working at the Andrews Forest or the

group, in other words, was not an initial goal leading Jones to this involvement.

She abandoned a tenured appointment at the University of California Santa Barbara

and accepted a soft-money appointment with the Andrews group primarily because

her husband had already secured a position as research assistant in the soils department at OSU. A chance meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, with Logan Norris, the

20 Interview with Julia Jones, 1, 2, 8, 9.

21 Interview with Julia Jones, 1, 9.

A few people with

no direct role at the

Andrews Forest had

a major impact on

the character of the

community centered

on that place.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

309

Department Chair of Forest Science at OSU, then alerted Jones to the potential for

NSF funding. Grant subsequently hired her as a research assistant working on

streamflow studies until her own grant came through. She gained visibility in the

Corvallis Forestry Sciences Laboratory when Norris assigned her a temporary

office in that building, and Swanson, thereafter, invited her to attend LTER meetings. Later, when a position opened in the Geosciences Department at OSU, Jones

landed a tenure-track appointment.22

Relatively few Andrews associates landed secure, tenured positions after coming to the group on soft-money appointments. The protective umbrella of a tenuretrack position was generally more elusive. Bob Griffiths and Andy Moldenke, for

example, built successful careers without the long-term security of a tenured appointment. Others, like Running and Tucker, found tenured positions elsewhere,

while either curtailing their involvement with the group (as with Running), or

devising elaborate strategies whereby they could hold those positions while continuing remote cooperation at the Andrews Forest (Tucker). Still others, including

Sherri Johnson, became deeply involved with the group but faced the initial likelihood that their long-term career prospects lay elsewhere. Johnson eventually was

able to convert that initial, tenuous appointment into a more permanent appointment as a Forest Service employee assigned to work at the Andrews Forest. Many

others in similar circumstances were less fortunate, and only a very few, such as

22 Interview with Julia Jones, 4-5.

Figure 56—Julia Jones (3rd from left) leading a stream survey during a graduate student field geomorphology class.

Kevin McGuire on 17 September 2000
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310

Susan Stafford, stepped directly into a tenure-track niche tailored to the growing

needs of the group, or secured a tenure-track position at OSU after beginning their

association with the Andrews community, as did Jones. The path did sometimes

go the opposite direction. Some scholars who secured tenure-track appointments

at OSU in positions unrelated to the Andrews community, like Tim Schowalter,

later began working more closely with the group while pursuing their own research

agendas. In Schowalter’s case, those interests eventually led him away from the

group and into a new Department Chair position at Louisiana State University. In

short, different people had divergent, even contradictory motives for becoming involved with the group and the group viewed this complexity as a source of vitality.

Personality was an important variable determining how long a person was

willing to work on a series of short-term appointments. Some people thrived under

that arrangement, whereas others found it a strain. A few actually found it liberating, by comparison with the constraints and demands that university faculty faced

on the road to tenure. Moldenke and Griffiths illustrate the combination of personal

sacrifice, professional productivity, collaborative enthusiasm, and adaptive opportunism supporting science efforts at the Andrews in the 1990s. Both of these

scientists worked on soft-money appointments for three decades at OSU, made

critical contributions to the group in leading and supporting roles, and enthusiastically advocated the collaborative accomplishments of that community. In short,

they exemplify the spirit of self-selection as two scientists who “caught the vision,”

held their focus through a sustained period of uncertainty regarding future funding

for their positions, and built successful careers on that tenuous foundation.

An early exposure to the world of grant-funded research and a family heritage of doing world-class science helped some people adjust to a career with the

Andrews group. A life funded with soft-money appointments, in such cases,

offered a freedom that tenure-track appointments often did not. A person’s past

experience writing grant proposals built confidence and dispelled concerns about

what would happen at the end of each new project. Moldenke, for example, grew

up in a household accustomed to weekly visits from world-class biologists. Both

of his parents were scientists, and his father was a “world-famous” botanist. The

younger Moldenke followed the family bent through an undergraduate degree in

biology from Wesleyan University in 1966 and earned a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1971, working under the direction of Paul Ehrlich.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

311

Moldenke’s connection with the Andrews began with his work for the IBP at

Stanford University. He first met McKee at an IBP meeting, and that link with

McKee eventually led him into the group.23 After he left Stanford, Moldenke

continued with the IBP at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until he

moved to Corvallis to accompany his spouse, who had found employment at

OSU. Moldenke’s freelance status and spirit freed him from bureaucratic constraints at OSU, where he found “tremendous bureaucratic pressure” that otherwise impeded collaborative work by many of his colleagues with tenured

positions.24

The attraction of the Andrews group, for a long-term, soft-money associate

like Moldenke, was unquestionably people, not place. He found “nothing unusual”

about the experimental forest apart from the fact that it had “a little more old

growth than most other places.” It was convenient relative to other useful field

sites, but more important, the group offered Moldenke an intellectual home and

opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange. He participated in that community,

and he joined efforts to educate other people about the group’s work. He spent

7 years as co-principal investigator on an NSF grant with McKee developing the

Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. He also collaborated with

McKee and others in the group on a sustainable forestry program administered

through Chemeketa Community College, in Salem, Oregon. He secured another

5-year grant from NSF to provide teachers at high schools and middle schools

with handson training in ecology during the summer, in an effort to instill cuttingedge science into teaching curricula in secondary education. That effort embodied

the collaborative spirit of the group. People, Moldenke argues, are an enormous,

under-used asset with “tremendous potential” to assist agency scientists by gathering data that otherwise would never be collected. His ultimate goal is to “get more

people in the public involved in ‘science.’”25

Some people who participated in the science of the Andrews group during the

1990s worked nearby for many years before they were even aware of that collaborative community. Griffiths, for example, began a series of short-term appointments with the group in the early 1990s, after a long, previous history working on

soft money at OSU. He adapted his skills to fill a specific niche the group identified

23 Interview with Andy Moldenke, 1-2, 4.

24 Interview with Andy Moldenke, 2.

25 Interview with Andy Moldenke, 5, 15.

The attraction of the

Andrews group, for

a long-term, softmoney associate

like Moldenke, was

unquestionably

people, not place.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

312

and encouraged him to occupy. Originally from Ohio, Griffiths followed a circuitous path to the Andrews Forest. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate

in pre med and earned a degree in zoology-chemistry in 1961. After a 3-year stint

in the Navy, and a brief career working for a pharmaceutical company, he entered

the graduate program in biology at San Jose State University and finished his MA

degree in 1968. At San Jose, Griffiths linked up with a marine microbiologist who

was a protégé of the OSU microbiologist, Dick Morita. That connection brought

Griffiths to Corvallis for his doctoral research, building on his earlier work with

marine micro-organisms. Marine microbiology was a far stretch from studies of

forest soils, and the group had to actively recruit Griffiths. It was not a case of

self-selection.26

Incidental contacts between colleagues at OSU sometimes led people to invite

a third party to participate in a project related to the group. An OSU colleague who

knew Griffiths mentioned his work to some other people in the group, and that

conversation led to a meeting with Griffiths. Kermit Cromack approached Griffiths

with the suggestion that the group’s work on nutrient cycling indicated some potential for interesting studies of mycorhizzal mats of forest soil. Waring reinforced

that initial contact with an invitation for Griffiths to evaluate a thesis for one of his

students. By that time, Griffiths, who completed his Ph.D. in 1972, had been working at OSU for nearly two decades, mostly in oceanography. Funding in that field,

however, was tight in the early 1990s, and Griffiths made the move to the Corvallis

Lab to work with the group, beginning in 1992. By 1998, he was still contributing

to long-term research efforts at the Andrews Forest, although he was officially

retired after nearly three decades on soft-money appointments at OSU.27

Access and acceptance were not difficult for someone who the group actively recruited, but for people who did try to “self-select” themselves as members of the Andrews community, it was tricky. At the opposite end of her career

from Griffiths in the mid 1990s, Sherri Johnson secured a soft-money, postdoctoral appointment with the LTER group in Corvallis after actively pursuing

leads through her professional networks. By the time she joined the Andrews

community, Johnson was already well acquainted with their work, the LTER,

and leading scientists in the Andrews group. She also had direct links with the

people and programs at the Andrews. Her academic career stretched from Kansas

26 Interview with Robert Griffiths, 1, 2.

27 Interview with Robert Griffiths, 1, 2, 5-6, 9.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

313

to the University of Montana, in Missoula, with a detour into the business world

and conservation work. At Missoula, she developed an interest in water, ecology,

and geology, and she pursued graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma, earning a Ph.D. in 1996. Johnson’s major professor at Oklahoma was Alan Covich,

who was a principal investigator on a study at the Luquillo LTER site in Puerto

Rico, and he subsequently chaired the Fish and Wildlife Department at Colorado

State University, where Susan Stafford later accepted an appointment to chair the

Forest Science Department.

The LTER connection at Luquillo was a venue for Johnson to broaden her

range of professional contacts while gaining field experience working on a major

NSF grant. She met Swanson at joint LTER meetings in the early 1990s. By that

time, she had already heard about the program at the Andrews, and her meeting

with Swanson generated real enthusiasm for that place. She was impressed with

his “gestalt feeling” about landscapes and streams, and she was drawn to the idea

of studying them in association rather than as isolated components of the ecosystem. At the 1993 All Scientists LTER meeting, Johnson shared a room with Jones.

The next year, while attending an intersite meeting of LTER hydrologists, Johnson

encountered Grant. She connected with Jones and Grant on the basis of her own

studies of ecological disturbances from a hurricane at the Luquillo site and those

connections motivated her initial efforts to join the group.28

Multiple contacts in the Andrews group attracted Johnson to that community,

but even so, acceptance was elusive. Johnson initially contacted Stan Gregory

about the possibility of “doing a postdoc” with him, but despite some vaguely

encouraging words, she discovered that “following through was hard” because

“people here are so busy.” Then, at the 1993 All Scientists LTER meeting, she “hit

up” Jones with the idea of securing a postdoctoral appointment with the group. The

results were hardly encouraging. Jones initially responded that she was “not ready

for a postdoc” and had too many other pressing demands on her time. At a later

meeting of the Ecological Society of America, nearly 2 years later, Johnson suggested the idea to Jones a second time, with more promising results. She followed

up with a written proposal, and Jones suggested a few ideas she “might be interested in.” Johnson was particularly interested in working with Jones to learn her

techniques of spatial analysis, to “take stream research to more of a landscape

scale.” Johnson also approached Grant with similar ideas. Despite encouraging

28 Interview with Sherri Johnson, 1-3.
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314

comments from both Jones and Grant, and despite Johnson’s contacts with some

of the more prominent scientists in the group, they didn’t have a “specific project”

for her and “nothing was really coming up.” Johnson, subsequently, wrote her own

proposal to fund an independent position with the group, and concluded, “Persistence plays a big role in trying to work with a group like this, because they are so

busy.”29

The group had come a long way from its early years when Franklin and

Dyrness searched for ways to attract more people to the Andrews Forest in a

desperate bid to keep it open. By the time Johnson began sending out feelers in

1996, the phenomenon of someone seeking access to the group was so unremarkable that she had difficulty attracting attention. Even her direct contacts and ability

to bring in her own funding did little to smooth her way or generate active support

from leaders in the group. The Andrews, by that time, was an established, reputable, and enviable site with facilities that Johnson describes as “plush,” even by

comparison with Hubbard Brook or Coweeta. It had a reputation for interdisciplinary exchange and collaborative relations with forest managers that was unique

and particularly appealing to Johnson. The setting in the Northwest, and the potential for strengthening the link between basic and applied research also were major

attractions. States in the Midwest, for example, offered more direct support for

research and education, but Johnson wanted to be in the Northwest badly enough

to move there on a soft-money appointment. Universities like OSU, she observed,

“take advantage” of the attraction the region holds for people from other parts of

the country. In Corvallis, she found other people, like herself, willing to build a

career on a series of soft-money appointments. Johnson had not encountered that

kind of enthusiasm in other places where she had worked. In that city, she found

an environment, people, and community that encouraged a “more interdisciplinary”

outlook. The work was “leading edge,” it was bigger than any one person, and the

interaction between state and federal agencies on the OSU campus made it “interesting.” She also discovered a “physical environment” that encouraged people to

interact in public spaces: “In Oklahoma no one was ever interested in what I was

doing in streams. People [here] see me down in the stream and they go ‘What are

you doing down there?’”30

29 Interview with Sherri Johnson, 8.

30 Interview with Sherri Johnson, 9-10, 12-14, 20.

She also discovered

a “physical environment” that encouraged people to

interact in public

spaces.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

315

Community Concerns About Significance, Scale, and Focus,

in Retrospect

Shared data, and the integration of new data with previous records, gave new

meaning to earlier work at the Andrews Forest during the 1990s, and the group

became more conscious of its history. Few of the people who worked there in the

first few decades after it was established had expected their work to be the focus

of controversial public debate. They certainly hoped, however, that it might inform

management decisions. More than a generation after the first research studies were

implemented at the Andrews Forest, those hopes were realized. Stafford’s unit

integrated those and subsequent studies into the data-sharing network the group

assembled in the last two decades of the 20th century. By the second decade of the

LTER, the fundamental characteristics of the site, the people, and their research

and management priorities were closely interrelated. It was a place transformed by

a community. People there perceived the landscape through the lens of a constantly

changing set of shared values. The changing face of that landscape inspired them,

and their actions changed the place. They imposed a series of management templates on the Andrews Forest while documenting changes in that landscape. Their

efforts produced a stream of data they openly shared with people beyond their own

community. The group remade itself and the Andrews Forest in a process of

coevolution that seemed natural to the changing membership of that community.

New scientific theories, management initiatives, and funding priorities, influenced

the group’s perception of the place and the potential for research there. Even the

ideal of appropriate research and its significance changed over time, along with the

people and the place. By the end of the 20th century, the group was a prominent and

influential community of established researchers and managers. It had a reputation

that attracted people who expected their work to influence management decisions

on regional, national, and global scales.

People interacted with each other and with the landscape of the Andrews in

ways that helped them break down barriers among people from different agencies

and academic disciplines. Scientists used the place to help them explain and demonstrate their ideas to forest managers. The place also helped forest managers explain

their concerns and priorities to the research community and to the public, and to

help them understand the practical implications of their ideas. People tested their

theories in the real world of the Andrews Forest, in the company of other people

who documented and analyzed the results. It was also a place where scientists

could go to explore questions other people posed about natural processes, and it
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316

was a place of education where people shared ideas with students at all levels. As

more people became concerned about the possible effects of logging on streams,

they demanded answers to those questions from public agencies. That political

pressure encouraged scientists to study a broader range of issues. Some of the

issues could be explored at the Andrews Forest, but others had to be examined

on a larger landscape or across long spans of time. As a result, the group began

exploring archival records and other research sites. The boundaries of their work

expanded in time and space. The group’s studies, consequently, generated data

that spanned greater distances and more years. Scientists scrambled to develop the

tools they needed to handle the greater amount of data generated by that work and

to understand and represent processes that worked on spatial and temporal scales

so large that most people could not easily grasp their significance. Computergenerated models were especially appealing. The trend toward computerized manipulation of data, however, distanced the people who analyzed the data from the

people who did the field work. The group tried to bridge that gap by developing a

systematic procedure to encourage collaboration at an early stage, but that formal

Figure 57—Although computer manipulation of data effectively distanced some researchers from field work, this view

of Don Henshaw collecting high-resolution global positioning

system monument data on the Santiam Airstrip Benchmark in

1992 demonstrates how the increasingly portable computing

technology of that decade could also move data management

into closer association with fieldwork.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

317

process could not fully replace the physical experience of living and working under

field conditions. Few scientists who began working at the Andrews Forest in the

1990s experienced what one scientist described as a 3-month field season living

in a “stinky trailer” with clothes that never dried out. Gordon Grant suggests that

without that visceral, physical experience, new recruits might miss out on something that helped forge the group’s character and emotional attachment to the

Andrews as a real and unique place. “This,” Grant explains, “is where the science

meets the river.”31

The intimate link between people and place eroded as the program reached

beyond the Andrews Forest and assumed a scale beyond the capacity of direct

experience. Fewer of the people who joined the group in the 1990s spent as much

time in the field as was common in earlier decades. A greater proportion of the

group spent more time working with computers and archival records, writing

papers, and going to meetings. Even those people who spent the majority of their

time in the field often had limited firsthand knowledge of the projects others in the

group had installed at the Andrews Forest or at other, remote sites. The Andrews

was still a place where ideas encountered reality, but the group spent more time

developing structured opportunities to take people out to that Forest on programmed tours. People in the group and other visitors, increasingly, had to be

shown where the science met the river (and the forest) because for most of them,

the science had grown beyond their own personal experience.32

As the group adapted its tools and methods to the demands and possibilities

of the computer age, people in the Andrews community worked to reconcile their

professional lives with their personal experience. The experience of Gordon Grant

illustrates the paradox of a place-centered community comprised of people who

spend much of their time distant from that place. He is at once native and alien to

the region and the Andrews Forest. Although he was born in New York, Grant’s

childhood experiences in Oregon shaped his perceptions of Northwest rivers. And,

although he grew up in Oregon, Grant headed east to learn new ways of thinking

about rivers in the region he left behind. As a Forest Service scientist, he built

intricate computer simulations from data describing processes across a matrix

of time and space that no longer existed, except in human concept. He, nevertheless, eloquently articulates an ethic of personal experience in pursuit of scientific

abstraction. He expresses an appreciation for the bond between people and the

31 Interview with small watersheds group, 12.

32 Interview with small watersheds group, 12-13.
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landscape while acknowledging an innate sense of personal alienation and a lifetime

quest for reconnection. During his childhood, shortly after Grant’s family moved to

Oregon, they went to see the McKenzie River White Water Parade, held the weekend before fishing season opened. At that parade, Grant sat on the shore watching

“drunks” go through the rapids, and thinking “how much I wanted to be on the

river.” He found the whole experience “so different” from his background growing

up in “very much an East Coast family,” and he was the only person in that family

who “bonded” with the western landscape and the traditions linked with that

region.33

Privilege, Access, and Authority in a Science-Based Community

The Andrews community was a welcoming environment for people with family

backgrounds that encouraged a scientific bent but established difficult standards

of accomplishment for their children. By the 1990s, that community included

many people who had spent much of their lives learning to feel comfortable with

their own heritage, and they found a home in this group. Like Moldenke, Waring,

and many others in the group, Grant came from a family of high-achievers

and academics, and he felt the pressure of their expectations. In an effort to step

out from the shadow of his father, a developmental biologist at the University of

Oregon, Grant sought his own level in the hydraulic West. After a brief stint at

Reed College, a prestigious private school in the Willamette Valley, he dropped out

to pursue a meandering career as a handyman and river guide in Oregon, California,

and Idaho. After 5 years of introducing other people to nearby rivers, Grant found

his calling. He returned to college at the University of Oregon and wrote an honors

thesis exploring the people and ecology of the Willamette River. As he interviewed

people on and about the river for that project, Grant also explored related science

questions. In that context, he encountered Swanson during a campaign to establish

an environmental studies program at the University of Oregon. Swanson later drew

Grant into an association with that group.34

A prominent characteristic of the LTER cohort of the Andrews community in

the last decade of the 20th century was personal and professional mobility through

high-profile academic programs and research facilities. The Andrews was a nationally prominent program offering career opportunities throughout that period. People with broad experience in other high-profile programs often built a web of

33 Interview with Gordon Grant, 1.

34 Interview with Gordon Grant, 2-3.

A prominent

characteristic of

the LTER cohort

of the Andrews

community was

personal and professional mobility

through high-profile

academic programs

and research

facilities.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

319

contacts that linked them directly or indirectly with the Andrews group. Grant

joined that science community in the first decade of the LTER era and remained

with the group through the end of the century. He spent 2 years after graduating

from the University of Oregon presenting his thesis in a series of public slide

shows in the Willamette Valley and then began graduate work at Johns Hopkins

University, in Baltimore, Maryland. He admired the academic traditions of the

Northeastern United States, and he “really wanted to go to the East Coast” to “test”

his “affinities” for the academic lifestyle. He initially considered Yale and Cornell,

but this child of a biochemist was an experienced river guide who had studied

geomorphology with Swanson, and Swanson had links with the U.S. Geological

Survey. Grant learned “through the grape vine” that Johns Hopkins was the place

to go if he was interested in working with rivers at the U.S. Geological Survey.35

The elite academies of higher education on the East coast were an obvious

place to build professional networks, and by the late 20th century, the Andrews

Forest attracted people from those networks. At Hopkins, Grant worked with

M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman, who “wrote the book” on the science of rivers.

Grant’s connection with Wolman, and his chance encounter with Gordie Reeves,

who worked at the Corvallis Forestry Sciences Laboratory, helped Grant renew his

acquaintance with Swanson. These connections ultimately helped Grant secure

funding and office space in the Corvallis Forestry Sciences Laboratory, where he

worked while completing his doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins. He met Reeves

at a barbeque after a run on the McKenzie River with a commercial rafting company, and in the course of their conversation, Reeves suggested Grant should

look at some papers Swanson and Lienkaemper had written. Grant later wrote to

Swanson, asking for copies of the papers. Swanson sent back the papers, asking,

“What’s the Wolman group doing?” The “group,” to which Swanson referred,

included Grant’s office mate at Hopkins, Julia Jones, who joined the Andrews

community about a decade after Grant began his work at the Corvallis Forestry

Sciences Laboratory. Grant later met Swanson at a symposium on the Mount St.

Helens event, and during that encounter, Swanson suggested that if Grant wanted

to do something in Oregon, Swanson would help him secure funding to support

that work.36

35 Interview with Gordon Grant, 4-5.

36 Interview with Gordon Grant, 5-6.
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320

Transitioning into the Andrews group, for any new recruit, was more than a

simple matter of securing funding. It was a mentoring process that introduced the

new associate to other scientists in the community on terms that encouraged their

interest and collaboration in his work. In Grant’s case, Swanson invited him to join

a group of students on a field excursion to the Andrews, where Franklin, Waring,

Sollins, Fredriksen, and Harr joined them to talk about their research projects. They

assembled in a circle at a parking lot in Blue River, and they went around the circle

introducing themselves to the group. Grant was particularly struck by the relative

ease with which they welcomed him into their circle as a “walk-on from the East

Coast.” The bewildering number and variety of people, personalities, and scientific

interests at the Andrews could be disconcerting, but for someone who could

identify a niche, it was also inviting. Grant spent most of his first day at the

Andrews bouncing around logging roads in a van filled with other scientists and

graduate students. He came away impressed with the variety of academic disciplines there and with an idea that he could find a niche as a river specialist. He

quickly identified Gregory and Sedell as people with similar interests, but they

tended to focus more on the habitat functions of the stream, whereas Grant was

more focused on the “physical structure and dynamics of mountain streams.” He

Figure 58—Watershed Management Project Group. Otis Hinton, Neil Cane, Craig

Creel, Gordon Grant, Dennis Harr, and Ross Mersereau doing measurements for pool

retention work on Lookout Creek.

Al Levno, July 1987
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

321

was interested in rapids, and how and why they formed, but he tried to link that

interest to the habitat issues that concerned other people in the group who were

ecologists, not geomorphologists.37

The expanding scale of the group’s research created new niches for people

who joined the group in the last two decades of the century. Grant had previously

considered the Andrews a place that focused mostly on small-scale, small-watershed issues. Sedell, Swanson, Gregory, and others, however, had taken their ideas

beyond small watersheds with the river-continuum concept, and that shift created

an opportunity for Grant to find a place in the group for his studies of the physical

characteristics of larger rivers.38 People like Grant found a place in the Andrews

community by establishing rapport with others in the group who shared similar or

compatible interests. They wove those individual relations into a web of interlocking affiliations. The assembled group functioned as an assortment of individual

affiliations that were joined together from the bottom up, not from the top down,

but they were not a random, or even self-selecting sample of the available talent in

the broader scientific community beyond the Andrews.

The Paradox of Structured Informality and the Myth of Accidental

Community

At its root, the group was a set of informal relations that combined into an ordered

community capable of acting in its own, collective self-interest. Informal connections were more important than formal introductions or positions in the group. For

some people, as with Johnson, only a concerted, determined effort enabled her to

seize onto one of those threads of individual affiliation and use it to weave a fragile

niche of belonging in the group. For others, such as Grant, access was a more

simple, almost “natural” transition, in which the structured informality of their

initiation seemed, from their perspective, virtually un-orchestrated. The informal

tone of the monthly LTER meetings, the HJA Daze, and similar “pulses” fostered

that illusion of unstructured ease, but these efforts required hard work and diligent

commitment to the group. Leaders in the group held innumerable meetings behind

the scenes, and many people spent much of their time on committee work, demonstrating a willingness to follow through, even at the sacrifice of personal goals.

That leadership core succeeded largely because they were able to build the illusion

of a self-regulating community, relatively shorn of bureaucratic trappings, wherein

37 Interview with Gordon Grant, 6-7.

38 Interview with Gordon Grant, 7.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

322

individuals could pursue their own interests and freely collaborate, with impunity.

The next cohort of Andrews associates, however, faced the difficult task of

learning how to sustain this apparently unstructured, yet oddly permanent community. Most agreed that the Andrews Forest was the key ingredient to what made

things work.

The group had constructed a dual identity for the Andrews Forest by the end

of the 1990s. On the one hand, it was a developed place with urban amenities that

could support a large population of scientists and staff. A developed system of

roads linked dormitories, laboratories, meeting rooms, and conference halls with a

mapped, plotted, surveyed, and documented outdoor laboratory. On the other, they

promoted the “pristine” character of the place as a setting for spiritual renewal,

mystical and professional inspiration, and reconnection with nature. They gave

tours of the place that typically began at the headquarters site, where members of

the group guided visitors through a maze of buildings, offices, meeting halls, and

laboratories, then loaded them into vans and chauffeured them along developed

roads to various points of interest and study sites, culminating in a lunch break at

Carpenter Saddle. From there, guests could look down the Lookout Creek drainage

to the west, and compare that landscape with the view of recently logged units on

the Willamette National Forest to the east. By the late afternoon, they returned to

the headquarters site for a barbecue or catered dinner in the outdoor pavilion.

Students and other workers temporarily living in the surrounding dormitories often

joined the festivities, and trails tempted visitors away from the headquarters site to

explore stands of timber and riparian settings along the lower portion of Lookout

Creek. It was a constructed landscape at once accessible, impressive, developed,

and interpreted. It was a forest where carefully cultivated myths served a scientific

purpose. Little in this place happened by accident.

Conclusion

The purpose of the Andrews Forest and group, by the late 1990s, was to provide

a venue in which scientists could work collaboratively with forest managers to

inform public policy and to promote the ideal of ecosystem management. Even as

the group worked to sustain basic, long-term research, it was also working to

demonstrate that ecosystem management could work on a landscape scale. The

people involved in that effort often used the language of ecosystem management to

describe how they became involved and why they stayed. They encouraged the

idea among their visitors that the group was “self selecting,” had “naturally

It was a constructed

landscape at once

accessible, impressive, developed,

and interpreted.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

323

evolved,” and that any effort to consciously manage people in that community

would likely “wreck it.” Mechanisms of authority in the group were subtle, often

hidden, and seldom openly discussed. Much happened behind the scenes, while

loosely structured monthly meetings maintained the climate of informality, openness, and inclusiveness. Personal networks made it work, but as the number of

people involved in the group increased, along with the amount of capital invested in

the infrastructure projects at the Andrews Forest, people outside that community

scrutinized those mechanisms more closely. The group was responsible for a site

that served as a prototype for other parts of the LTER network. As one product of

their involvement in that science-based network, the group promoted collaboration

between managers and scientists, leading to policies that applied the most current

concepts of ecological research. The useful fiction that people in the Andrews

community were themselves an example of “natural” selection, ultimately conflicted with the idea that other sites could be managed along similar lines. The place

was more prominent than in previous decades, and the political implications of

ecosystem management forced the group to reexamine its own history and consciously plan its future.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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Chapter Nine: An Ecosystem of Ideas Grounded in a

Place of Inspiration

Throughout the history of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews Forest), applied studies were an important, sometimes dominant element of the research accomplished at that site. Since the early 1970s, however, people in the

Andrews group tended to focus more on how the ecosystem actually functions

and less on how foresters might maximize timber production or even manage

forests for multiple uses and environmental protection. Broader issues and institutional priorities continue to inform, limit, or encourage people who worked at the

Andrews Forest, and people in the group often express the hope that their work

will inform public policy. Those concerns, however, do not sufficiently explain the

group’s struggle to understand forest ecology and related ecosystem processes in

that setting. These people were largely motivated by the firm conviction that they

were doing necessary, interesting, and rewarding work.

A deep respect for the beauty of the Andrews Forest encouraged each person

to believe that their work in that place mattered, and that sensibility grounded their

science in the real world of that particular, forested landscape and the streams that

coursed through it. Gregory observes that a visit to that place is an aesthetic and

intellectual experience that motivates and rejuvenates people: “It has a diversity of

old systems and young systems, and wet systems and dry systems, and has lots

of pieces, but they’re also really valuable. They’re beautiful, aesthetically beautiful.

They’re scientifically intriguing.” This character of the place, he argues, “stimulates us. Every time we go back, it charges our batteries.” The place, he suggests,

contributes to the reputation of the group: “Reviewers come out and they see the

Andrews ... and they give it a nice look and then say, ‘Boy, this is so beautiful.’”

That characteristic, he concludes, helps account for the group’s ability to attract

people to soft-money appointments: “If you’re sitting in Blacksburg, Virginia, you

don’t get many opportunities to sit next to a creek in a 500-year-old forest.

On the landscape of the Andrews, people developed long-term working relationships and partnerships that facilitated work across disciplines and in partnership with people in different administrative structures. Those relationships helped

the group weather the ups and downs of funding that were constantly in flux.

They promoted a sustaining outlook that merged persistence on key research

themes with attentiveness to the issues of the day. In similar ways, those longterm, working relationships supported the consensus-oriented, leadership style that
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

325

the group embraced as a cultural ideal and attempted to implement as an operative

reality. Perhaps most importantly, those continuing attributes were punctuated by

periods of recruitment, when new people joined the group, infusing it with new

energy, enthusiasm, and creative ideas in a community that idealized, and attempted

to realize, an ethic of respectful, shared leadership, careful stewardship, and

collaborative decisionmaking.

The Andrews Forest and Community, in Retrospect, 1948 to 1998

Scientists learned from their early experiences at the Andrews Forest that as long

as they depended on support from just one institution, their programs were vulnerable. Silen, for example, built strong personal and professional ties with local residents in the vicinity of Blue River while installing long-term studies he intended to

continue through the end of his career. In the end, however, the Forest Service

summarily reassigned Silen, and discontinued many of the studies he began there.

His successors, Rothacher, Franklin, and Dyrness, seldom engaged the local community in Blue River as they battled agency proposals to undercut or terminate support from the Pacific Northwest Research Station (PNW Station) for the Andrews.

They lived in proximity with district staff at Blue River, but they kept their distance

from those national forest colleagues and focused, instead, on marketing the place

to scholars at Oregon Station University (OSU). They promoted its potential for

significant research and they invited anyone who was interested to join their group.

They hosted brown-bag seminars in Corvallis to encourage interdisciplinary exchange, but they found stronger common ground at the Andrews. In that place,

they built a sense of shared community on a foundation of volunteerism, enthusiasm, personal connections, and commitment to scientific research. People participated because they “caught the vision,” but individual enthusiasm wasn’t enough

to sustain the group. They needed funding and other resources. To sustain their

science goals, the group built links with national and international associates.

Funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) strengthened the group

during the International Biological Programme (IBP), but that infusion of resources

favored basic research over applied studies. The NSF support attracted new people

to the group and strengthened its ties with other IBP sites and academic programs.

The IBP funding structure, however, was not sustainable, and it included NSF

oversight that required a more structured framework for coordinating the group’s

work at the Andrews. The IBP project also attracted a new cohort of scientists
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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accustomed to working in more-established and formalized research programs.

Waring, who emerged from that cohort, helped the group link its community

traditions with the more structured lines of responsibility that were required for

managing projects funded through NSF. Under his leadership, people who failed

to “catch” the revised vision of efficiency and productivity lost access to funding.

Professionalism was more important than volunteerism by the early 1980s.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were years of retrenchment, winnowing, and

renewal that centered on the problem of upgrading facilities to support ongoing research at the Andrews Forest. Franklin and McKee led a smaller core of Andrews

collaborators in this effort. Under their leadership, the group emphasized the need

for long-term commitment to productive science. They fostered a group ethic of

personal sacrifice and interdisciplinary collaboration that maximized the utility

of funding secured through various grants and programs. Their initial “facilities”

proposal to the NSF emphasized the group’s earlier research accomplishments with

only skeletal facilities and the trademark virtues of volunteerism, minimalism, and

efficiency at the Andrews.

The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) and related programs attracted a

new cohort of associates to the Andrews who arrived in the 1980s, often without

prior experience. With their help, the revitalized group built a paradoxical system:

they established long-term programs of research with short-term funding and

staffed them with fixed-term, “soft-money” appointments. They also struggled to

define a new model of leadership more appropriate to their evolving identity. The

group included people with a more diverse assortment of specialties and training

than in previous years, and they pursued multiple threads of research too diverse

for any one person to direct. Several new leaders assumed more authority, and

several former leaders either left the group or continued in less dominant roles.

Those who led the group through this period continued Franklin’s concept of

periodic “pulses” of scientific energy focused on a specific landscape in an effort

to promote a collaborative environment for intellectual inquiry. They also transformed the monthly LTER meetings into a regular touchstone for their increasingly

dispersed community of cooperating scientists and forest managers. They encouraged a group ethic of concerted, self-conscious community-building: collaborative

community was hard work, but it was also necessary and rewarding work.

The group’s structure of long-term research supported with short-term funding depended on cooperative relations among the Willamette National Forest, PNW

Station, and OSU. Station scientists, staff, technicians, university faculty, and

The Long Term

Ecological Research

(LTER) and related

programs attracted a

cohort of associates

to the Andrews who

arrived in the 1980s,

often without prior

experience.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

327

students in Corvallis supplied the critical mass of forest and stream science expertise, academic credibility, and access to physical resources. The Willamette

National Forest staff at Blue River supplied management expertise vital to accomplishing LTER and other research goals. Scientists at the Andrews Forest began

to seek opportunities for working more closely with forest managers, and Kerrick

encouraged those efforts as forest supervisor for the Willamette National Forest.

The result was a more confident and assertive scientific community that enthusiastically embraced applied research and collaborated with forest managers.

Many people who joined the group in the 1980s came from other LTER programs where researchers had access to more well-equipped field research facilities than were available at the Andrews. The place attracted people interested in

the work the group was doing there, rather than people who were impressed with

the creature comforts of the place. Their connections with leaders at other LTER

sites helped the group integrate programs at the Andrews with related work at

those other research facilities. These factors, and the eruption of Mount St. Helens,

helped the group expand its geographic focus. Swanson personified the new profile of the group, with a broad-ranging, interdisciplinary background and experience

with a variety of collaborative programs of research from the east coast to the

tropics and in the West. Together with McKee, he merged the enthusiasm of the

IBP experience with the spirit of open inquiry, the mission-focused professionalism

of those who joined the Andrews group to begin the LTER work, and the placegrounded science and localized identity that had anchored the group since 1948.

Figure 59—By the late 1980s, the Andrews group was consciously celebrating its history of

accomplishments, as evident in this photograph of award recipients at the H.J. Andrews

Experimental Forest’s 40th year anniversary review.

Al Levno, October 1988
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As national leaders debated various strategies for securing habitat for the northern spotted owl, Andrews associates moved their discussions beyond the owl to

include broad landscape themes. They rapidly coalesced around a more diffuse assortment of leaders, notably including Swanson, McKee, Burditt, and Cissel, who

added a broader, national perspective to the management side of the collaborative

group at Blue River. These leaders managed the group’s transition from studiously

vague and informal traditions to a more formalized framework of interaction more

closely aligned with what the cohort of scientists recruited to the Andrews during

the 1980s had experienced at other LTER sites.

Capital projects transformed the headquarters site and the group during the

1990s. People who joined the group in this period worked for an established

program with a visually impressive, physical infrastructure of lab facilities, dormitories, meeting rooms, roads, plots, reference stands, flumes, gages, and welldocumented, long-term experiments. They could draw on a half-century of

continuous records from monitoring, intensive mapping efforts, experimental

studies, prolific publication, and photographic collections. The group also had a

sophisticated system for managing data and for seamlessly integrating new studies

with previous work. It was an influential group, with members on presidential

advisory panels that shaped federal policy for regional application (the Northwest

Forest Plan) and with national and international implications.

At the local scale, the group waged a campaign to secure a tenured appointment for Mark Harmon and established him as a prominent leader of the Andrews

community. Harmon subsequently gained appointment in 1999, making a professional leap from soft-money, postdoctoral funding to an endowed position as a

tenured full professor and Richardson Chair in Forest Science at OSU. Harmon’s

appointment was not assured, despite his record of professional success and the

full support of the group. Minutes from the monthly LTER meetings also indicate

the search was “exceptionally competitive.” The appointment positioned Harmon to

“fully take over” leadership of the LTER as principal investigator for the NSF LTER

grant, replacing Swanson in that role in 1999.1

By the end of the century, the group managed real assets of human and physical capital capable of arousing envy and resentment. Critics included the writer,

Alston Chase, who prominently featured people associated with the group in his

1

 Communication from Fred Swanson August 1999; H.J. Andrews LTER-Cascade Center

for Ecosystem Management meeting notes (4 August 1999).
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

329

polemical attack on the concept of ecosystem management.2 Closer to home, Sherri

Johnson, who joined the group after prior experience at the Luquillo Experimental

Forest in Puerto Rico, had to cope with envious, if admiring colleagues at that

LTER site who insinuated she was joining a group of well-funded “elitists” at the

Andrews Forest.3 The group struggled to reconcile its idealized past of virtuous

self-sacrifice with its real character in the 1990s, when it enjoyed an almost embarrassing wealth of resources by comparison with earlier years and with many

other research sites. Amidst programmed celebrations commemorating the 40- and

50-year anniversaries of the experimental forest, most people in the group continued to espouse the ideal of a self-selecting, naturally adjusting, organic community,

and one member, whose involvement dated back to the IBP years darkly warned,

“If we look too closely at how this thing works, we’ll wreck it.”

Scientific Method and the Spirit of Inquiry

The group’s effort to understand its own past, despite some uncertainty about how

that effort might affect the functioning of this science-based community, was part

of its long-term planning process. In the late 1990s, the group commissioned a

community history, scheduled conferences to commemorate the forest’s 50th

2

 Alston Chase, “In a Dark Wood: the Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of

Ecology” (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

3

 Interview with Sherri Johnson, 23.

Figure 60—An annual gathering of associates of the Andrews group took on the appearance of a

large family reunion, as evident in this group photo of “HJA Daze” participants in 2000 at the

headquarters site on the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest.

Al Levno, 21 June 2000

Most people in the

group continued to

espouse the ideal

of a self-selecting,

naturally adjusting,

organic community.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

330

anniversary, and convened a “futuring” session. In these ways, people in the group

explored the intersections of their past, present, and future in an effort to define

and understand the character of a community that had consciously avoided formal

definition. That effort demonstrated the group’s collaborative style of leadership

and its shared sense of stewardship for the Andrews and the legacy of prior work

there. By the end of the 20th century, people who worked together at the Andrews

joined a community of scientists and forest managers with a shared commitment

to research with an applied purpose.

For more than 50 years, people sought inspiration and validation for their

scientific and policy ideas at the Andrews Forest. In this place, scientific hypotheses inspired experimental manipulations that changed the landscape, and the group

monitored the results. In the process, people in that group articulated their separate

visions into collaborative action. They combined scientific insight, managerial initiative, and personal networks. They gained insights about how ecosystems function,

developed theories about adaptive management, and applied them on a landscape

Figure 61—This view of Fred Swanson speaking to a large group in field/roadside setting with vans in background dates from the

late 1970s, but it depicts an experience that is still familiar to most visitors to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews

Forest) in the early 21st century. Many long-term collaborative relationships begin with people from different academic backgrounds and disciplines riding together and sharing ideas in the back of a van on a “show me” tour of the Andrews Forest.

Rollie Geppert, 18 July 1979
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

331

scale. In a sense, it was an act of self-realization. The Andrews group, like the

ecosystems they studied, functioned as a complex system of dynamic interaction

among interdependent networks. It was an ecosystem of ideas and actions, and

what seemed natural within the group also seemed like an obvious strategy for

managing the landscape centering their community. Together, they linked scientific

inquiry at the Andrews Forest with people, place, and community. Their efforts

contributed to the emergence of “ecosystem management” as a guiding policy in

the Forest Service before the end of the 20th century.

The Real World of the Andrews Forest

A shared commitment to the real world brings everything home for the Andrews

Forest and group. The group is built around a shared body of knowledge that is

linked with a particular place. With unprecedented resources and an expanding

network of qualified expertise, the group constructed a dual identity for the

Andrews Forest at the end of the 20th century: It was a developed place with urban

amenities that could support a large population of scientists and staff in dormitories

with kitchens, onsite laboratories, meeting rooms, large conference halls, and a

developed system of roads linking these facilities with a mapped, plotted, and carefully surveyed and documented outdoor laboratory. As Fred Swanson observes,

however, the group provides a context that amounts to more than the sum of these

parts. It is an organic community that collectively sustains and builds on a body of

knowledge that is the product of thousands of scientist-years of work encapsulated

in writings and oral traditions. That body of knowledge includes countless informal

exchanges—stories told in hundreds of field trips, in classrooms, and in student

advisement sessions that survive largely in oral traditions and memories of face-toface conversations. The Andrews Forest is a physical reminder of those conversations—a totem of sorts with multiple faces. For many people in the group it was a

“pristine” setting for spiritual renewal, mystical and professional inspiration, and reconnection with nature. It was, however, also a constructed landscape at once

accessible, impressive, developed, and interpreted. Most importantly, it was a place

where pragmatic and thoughtful people frequently congregate to test their ideas

against each other and in a real-world setting. The Andrews Forest is a real place,

but it is also an idea and an ideal that transcends that place and encourages people

to think more critically about the world in which they live, and the ecological

processes of which they are a part.

The Andrews

Forest is a physical

reminder of those

conversations—a

totem of sorts with

multiple faces.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

332

Acknowledgments

Many people provided support, assistance, guidance, and access without which

this book would not have been possible. In addition to the numerous people who

agreed to sacrifice a significant amount of their time to make themselves available

for the oral history interviews, as cited throughout the text, many other people

provided significant behind-the scenes support and encouragement. The project

originated with the group’s decision in 1996 to commission a history of the

Andrews Forest to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the

experimental forest. A steering committee comprised of Fred Swanson, Art McKee,

Al Levno, Ted Dyrness, Martha Brookes, and Cindy Miner provided invaluable

guidance during early meetings that framed the focus, structure, and approach of

the work as based on oral history interviews of various, representative voices. A

subset of that committee, notably including Swanson, McKee, Dyrness, and

Brookes, reviewed an initial prospectus and preliminary outlines for the book and

suggested needed revisions and possible alternatives. Swanson, McKee, and

Dyrness were especially helpful in facilitating early communication with potential

interview candidates and secured office space and funding to support the project.

Swanson, McKee, Dyrness, and Brookes also provided detailed edits on multiple

drafts of the manuscript, suggesting many useful insights and details that helped

flesh out murky discussions, and tactfully suggesting areas in which the manuscript was veering off into confused terrain.

Fred Swanson also brainstormed and authored the sidebars that accompany

each chapter, with the support of Kathryn Ronnenberg, who converted ideas and

text into a visually integrated reality of graphics and explanatory materials. Theresa

Valentine put together maps and revised into a more printable format (see inside the

front cover of this book) the complex timeline that the Andrews group collaboratively generated, graphically depicting the chronological development of work at

the Andrews Forest and the different players who related to various themes of

research at that site, over time. Al Levno and Ted Dyrness were indefatigable in

locating and identifying a wide range of relevant photos to support the work, and

Martha Brookes and Don Henshaw also tracked down photos from their personal

collections and donated them to the Forest Science Data Bank for publication in

this work. Suzanne Remillard pulled together widely scattered photographs selected

from various formats and collections into a more systematic, CD-based collection

that facilitated final photo selection, placement, and crediting. Tami Lowry coordinated final preparation of the manuscript, and facilitated communications with
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

333

production staff at PNW Station. Carolyn Wilson skillfully shepharded the manuscript through final production stages. A staff of 12 transcriptionists, whose names

appear in the footnotes in connection with the particular transcripts on which they

worked, supported early efforts to move the interviews from the original tapes into

a more accessible form for review and analysis in a timely and efficient manner. It

would be impossible to list all of the other people who supported this project in

innumerable ways over the past few years, but I am especially grateful for Cindy

Miner’s unwavering support for this project, and for supporting the history series

at PNW Station. It is also impossible to exaggerate Fred Swanson’s unwavering

support and enthusiasm for the project, and I am especially grateful for the many

thoughtful insights and tactful comments that he has provided over these past 9

years. Our innumerable, casual conversations over that time, have advanced my

understanding of matters that go far beyond the scope of this book. I have, therefore, incurred a debt in the course of this project that would be impossible to repay.

In a project lasting more than 10 years, finally, I am deeply indebted to my spouse,

Gilda, and my daughter, Mitra, who have sacrified much to this effort.

Metric Equivalents

When you know: Multiply by: To Find:

Acres 0.405 Hectares

Board feet .00236 Cubic meters

Cubic feet .0283 Cubic meters

Cubic feet per .010933 Cubic meters per second

second per per square kilometer

square mile

Feet .3048 Meters

Inches 2.54 Centimeters

Miles 1.609 Kilometers

Square miles 2.59 Square kilometers

Celsius (°C) 1.8 and add 32 Fahrenheit

Note on Sources

As documented throughout the text, this book is largely based on oral history

interviews conducted by the author during 1997 and 1998, and on a large collection

of primary, unpublished documents, including administrative memos, letters, and

other uncatalogued, manuscript records to which the Andrews group provided the

author open access. These records are currently held in the Long Term Ecological

Research (LTER) library room at the PNW Station Forestry Science Laboratory in
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

334

Corvallis, Oregon. In addition to this collection of primary materials, the LTER

library room also houses a large quantity of “gray literature”—official reports and

records—generated by members of the Andrews group over the years. Some of

these were published as internal reports by various agencies and organizations.

Others were simply unpublished papers and reports filed for administrative purposes only.

Beyond these primary collections, this study relied on several published bibliographies of research associated with the Andrews Forest, which provided a helpful,

chronological summary of significant publications linked with the people whose

names surfaced in oral history interviews. The published articles and monographs

listed in those bibliographies were also available in the Forestry Sciences Laboratory storeroom, and they documented, from the authors’ perspectives, the purpose,

results, and significance of their research.

The published bibliographies are now available online at the H.J. Andrews

Experimental Forest Web site, http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/index.cfm under the

“Publications” link http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/pubs.cfm?topnav=11 as the “Master

List” http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/pubs/biblio/master.cfm?frameURL=http://

wwwdata.forestry.oregonstate.edu/lterhja/

show_cat_person_id_list.asp&topnav=80.

On the same Web site for the Andrews Forest (the Andrews Forest Home

page), the “Data” link http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/data.cfm?topnav=8 provides

access to the Forest Science Data Bank (FSDB). This FSDB link includes, among

other resources, a link to the “Image Library” http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/data/

cd_pics/cd_lists.cfm?topnav=116 and provides ready access to the photos that

were selected for use in this book. They are listed by the 3-letter CD reference

code (e.g., AAC, AAD, etc.) that forms the prefix for each photo cited in this work

(e.g., AAA_001). The site also includes a link to the data-use policy for data posted

on the FSDB: http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter/data/access.cfm?topnav=98#CITATION.

The Web site includes a cross-referenced system of searchable links. Records

and files generated in the course of this oral history project are also scheduled to be

deposited in the Forestry Sciences Laboratory Library with links to the FSDB.

The sidebars, which appear in each of the main chapters, were authored for

this book by Fred Swanson, with graphics developed for this book by Kathryn

Ronnenberg. The citations in those sidebars refer to the following publications:
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

335

Ackers, S.H. 2004. Long-term population monitoring of northern spotted owls:

recent results and implications for the Northwest Forest Plan. In: Arabas, K.;

Bowersox, J., eds. Forest futures: science, politics, and policy for the next

century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.: 155–173.

Beschta, R.L.; Pyles, M.R.; Skaugset, A.E.; Surfleet, C.G. 2000. Peakflow

responses to forest practices in the western cascades of Oregon, USA. Journal

of Hydrology. 233: 102–120.

Cissel, J.H.; Swanson, F.J.; Weisberg, P.J. 1999. Landscape management

using historical fire regimes: Blue River, Oregon. Ecological Applications.

9(4): 1217–1231.

Cohen, W.B.; Harmon, M.E.; Wallin, D.O.; Fiorella, M. 1996. Two decades

of carbon flux from forests of the Pacific Northwest: estimates from a new

modeling strategy. BioScience. 46(11): 836–844.

Cohen, W.B.; Spies, T.A. 1992. Estimating structural attributes of Douglas-fir/

western hemlock forest stands from Landsat and SPOT imagery. Remote

Sensing of Environment. 41: 1–17.

Dale, V.H.; Swanson, F.J.; Crisafulli, C.M., eds. 2005. Ecological responses

to the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens. New York: Springer. 342 p.

Denison, W.C. 1973. Life in tall trees. Scientific American. 228(6): 74–80.

Dyrness, C.T. 1967. Mass soil movements in the H.J. Andrews Experimental

Forest. Res. Pap. PNW-42. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station. 13 p.

Faustini, J.M. 2000. Stream channel response to peak flows in a fifth-order

mountain watershed. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University. 339 p. Ph.D.

dissertation.

Forman, R.T.T.; Sperling, D.; Bissonette, J.A. [et al.]. 2003. Road ecology:

science and solutions. Washington, DC: Island Press. 481 p.

Forsman, E.D.; Meslow, E.C.; Wight, H.M. 1984. Distribution and biology of

the spotted owl in Oregon. Wildlife Monographs. 87(April): 1–64.

Franklin, J.F.; Cromack, K., Jr.; Denison, W. [et al.]. 1981. Ecological

characteristics of old-growth Douglas-fir forests. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-118.

Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station. 48 p.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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Franklin, J.F.; Forman, R.T.T. 1987. Creating landscape patterns by forest cutting: ecological consequences and principles. Landscape Ecology.

1(1): 5–18.

Franklin, J.F.; MacMahon, J.A.; Swanson, F.J.; Sedell, J.R. 1985. Ecosystem

responses to the eruption of Mount St. Helens. National Geographic Research.

Spring: 198–216.

Franklin, J.F.; Spies, T.A. 1991a. Composition, function, and structure of oldgrowth Douglas-fir forests. In: Ruggiero, L.F.; Aubry, K.B.; Carey, A.B.; Huff,

M.H., tech. eds. Wildlife and vegetation of unmanaged Douglas-fir forests.

Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-285. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station: 71–80.

Franklin, J.F.; Spies, T.A. 1991b. Ecological definitions of old-growth Douglasfir forests. In: Ruggiero, L.F.; Aubry, K.B.; Carey, A.B.; Huff, M.H., tech. eds.

Wildlife and vegetation of unmanaged Douglas-fir forests. Gen. Tech. Rep.

PNW-285. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service,

Pacific Northwest Research Station: 61–69.

Froehlich, H.A. 1973. Natural and man-caused slash in headwater streams. In:

Loggers handbook, Vol. XXXIII. [Place of publication unknown]: Pacific

Logging Congress: [Not paged].

Garman, S.L.; Cissel, J.H.; Mayo, J.H. 2003. Accelerating development of latesuccessional conditions in young managed Douglas-fir stands: a simulation

study. Gen Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-557. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of

Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 57 p.

Gregory, S.V.; Boyer, K.L.; Gurnell, A.M., eds. 2003. The ecology and management of wood in world rivers. American Fisheries Society Symposium 37.

Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society. 444 p.

Gregory, S.V.; Swanson, F.J.; McKee, W.A.; Cummins, K.W. 1991. An ecosystem perspective of riparian zones. BioScience. 41(8): 540–551.

Harmon, M.E. 1991. Long-term experiments on log decomposition at the H.J.

Andrews Experimental Forest. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-280. Portland, OR: U.S.

Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station.

28 p.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

337

Harmon, M.E. 2001. Moving towards a new paradigm for woody detritus management. Ecological Bulletins. 49: 269–278.

Harmon, M.E.; Franklin, J.F.; Swanson, F.J. [et al.]. 1986. Ecology of coarse

woody debris in temperate ecosystems. In: MacFadyen, A.; Ford, E.D., eds.

Advances in ecological research. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, Inc.:

15: 133–302.

Harris, L.D. 1984. An island archipelago model for maintaining biotic diversity in

old-growth forests. In: New forests for a changing world: Proceedings of the

1983 convention of the Society of American Foresters. Washington, DC:

Society of American Foresters: 84-03: 378–382.

Johnson, S.L.; Swanson, F.J.; Grant, G.E.; Wondzell, S.M. 2000. Riparian

forest disturbances by a mountain flood — the influence of floated wood.

Hydrological Processes. 14: 3031–3050.

Jones, J.A. 2000. Hydrologic processes and peak discharge response to forest removal, regrowth, and roads in 10 small experimental basins, western

Cascades, Oregon. Water Resources Research. 36(9): 2621–2642.

Jones, J.A.; Grant, G.E. 1996. Peak flow responses to clear-cutting and roads in

small and large basins, western Cascades, Oregon. Water Resources Research.

32(4): 959–974.

Jones, J.A.; Swanson, F.J.; Wemple, B.C.; Snyder, K.U. 2000. Effects of roads

on hydrology, geomorphology, and disturbance patches in stream networks.

Conservation Biology. 14(1): 76-85.

Li, H.; Franklin, J.F.; Swanson, F.J.; Spies, T.A. 1993. Developing alternative

forest cutting patterns: a simulation approach. Landscape Ecology. 8(1): 63–75.

Lienkaemper, G.W.; Swanson, F.J. 1987. Dynamics of large woody debris

in streams in old-growth Douglas-fir forests. Canadian Journal of Forest

Research. 17: 150–156.

Maser, C.; Cline, S.P.; Cromack, K., Jr. [et al.]. 1988. What we know about

large trees that fall to the forest floor. In: Maser, C.; Tarrant, R.F.; Trappe,

J.M.; Franklin, J.F., tech. eds. From the forest to the sea: a story of fallen

trees. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-229. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station; U.S. Department of

the Interior, Bureau of Land Management: 25–45.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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McDade, M.H.; Swanson, F.J.; McKee, W.A. [et al.]. 1990. Source distances

for coarse woody debris entering small streams in western Oregon and

Washington. Canadian Journal of Forest Research. 20: 326–330.

Meehan, W.R.; Swanson, F.J.; Sedell, J.R. 1977. Influences of riparian vegetation on aquatic ecosystems with particular reference to salmonid fishes and

their food supply. In: Johnson, R.R.; Jones, D.A., tech. coords. Importance,

preservation and management of riparian habitat: a symposium. Gen. Tech.

Rep. RM-43. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service,

Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station: 137–145.

Michener, W.K.; Brunt, J.W.; Helly, J.J. [et al.]. 1997. Nongeospatial metadata

for the ecological sciences. Ecological Applications. 7(1): 330–342.

Murphy, M.L.; Hall, J.D. 1981. Varied effects of clear-cut logging on predators

and their habitat in small streams of the Cascade mountains, Oregon. Canadian

Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. 38: 137–145.

Nakamura, F.; Swanson, F.J. 1993. Effects of coarse woody debris on morphology and sediment storage of a mountain stream system in western Oregon.

Earth Surface Processes and Landforms. 18: 43–61.

Nakamura, F.; Swanson, F.J.; Wondzell, S.M. 2000. Disturbance regimes of

stream and riparian systems—a disturbance-cascade perspective. Hydrological

Processes. 14: 2849–2860.

Sedell, J.R.; Richey, J.E.; Swanson, F.J. 1989. The river continuum concept: a

basis for the expected ecosystem behavior of very large rivers? In: Dodge,

D.P., ed. Proceedings of the international large river symposium. Canadian

Special Publication of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 106. [Place of publication unknown]: [Publisher unknown]: 49–55.

Silen, R.R. 1955. More efficient road patterns for a Douglas-fir drainage. The

Timberman. 56(6): 82–88.

Spies, T.A.; Franklin, J.F.; Klopsch, M. 1990. Canopy gaps in Douglas-fir

forests of the Cascade Mountains. Canadian Journal of Forest Research.

20(5): 649–658.

Spies, T.A.; Ripple, W.J.; Bradshaw, G.A. 1994. Dynamics and pattern of a

managed coniferous forest landscape in Oregon. Ecological Applications.

4(3): 555–568.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

339

Swanson, F.J.; Cissel, J.H.; Reger, A. 2003. Landscape management: diversity

of approaches and points of comparison. In: Monserud, R.A.; Haynes, R.W.;

Johnson, A.C., eds. Compatible forest management. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers: 237–266.

Swanson, F.J.; Gregory, S.V.; Sedell, J.R.; Campbell, A.G. 1982. Land-water

interactions: the riparian zone, Chapter 9. In: Edmonds, R.L., ed. Analysis of

coniferous forest ecosystems in the western United States. US/IBP Synthesis

Ser. 14. Stroudsburg, PA: Hutchinson Ross Publishing Co.: 267–291.

Swanson, F.J.; Johnson, S.L.; Gregory, S.V.; Acker, S.A. 1998. Flood disturbance in a forested mountain landscape. BioScience. 48(9): 681–689.

Swanson, F.J.; Lienkaemper, G.W.; Sedell, J.R. 1976. History, physical

effects, and management implications of large organic debris in western

Oregon streams. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-56. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range

Experiment Station. 15 p.

Thomas, J.W.; Forsman, E.D.; Lint, J.B. [et al.]. 1990. A conservation strategy

for the northern spotted owl: a report of the Interagency Scientific Committee

to address the conservation of the northern spotted owl. Portland, OR: U.S.

Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau

of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service. 427 p.

Thomas, R.B.; Megahan, W.F. 1998. Peak flow responses to clear-cutting and

roads in small and large basins, western Cascades, Oregon: a second opinion.

Water Resources Research. 34(12): 3393–3403.

Triska, F.J.; Cromack, K., Jr. 1980. The role of wood debris in forests and

streams. In: Waring, R.H., ed. Forests: fresh perspectives from ecosystem

analysis: proceedings of the 40th annual Biology Colloquium. Corvallis, OR:

Oregon State University Press: 171–190.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; U.S. Department of the

Interior, Bureau of Land Management. 1994. Record of decision for

amendments to Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management planning

documents within the range of the northern spotted owl. [Place of publication

unknown]. 74 p. [plus attachment A: standards and guidelines].
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Van Sickle, J.; Gregory, S.V. 1990. Modeling inputs of large woody debris to

streams from falling trees. Canadian Journal of Forest Research. 20(10):

1593–1601.

Vannote, R.L.; Minshall, G.W.; Cummins, K.W. [et al.] 1980. The river

continuum concept. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

37(1): 130–137.

Wallin, D.O.; Swanson, F.J.; Marks, B. 1994. Landscape pattern response to

changes in pattern generation rules: land-use legacies in forestry. Ecological

Applications. 4(3): 569–580.

Wallin, D.O.; Swanson, F.J.; Marks, B. [et al.]. 1996. Comparison of managed

and pre-settlement landscape dynamics in forests of the Pacific Northwest,

USA. Forest Ecology and Management. 85: 291–309.

Wemple, B.C.; Jones, J.A. 2003. Runoff production on forest roads in a steep,

mountain catchment. Water Resources Research. 39(8): 8-1 to 8-17.

Wemple, B.C.; Swanson, F.J.; Jones, J.A. 2001. Forest roads and geomorphic

process interactions, Cascade Range, Oregon. Earth Surface Processes and

Landforms. 26: 191–204.

Wondzell, S.M.; Swanson, F.J. 1996a. Seasonal and storm dynamics of the

hyporheic zone of a 4th-order mountain stream. I: Hydrologic processes.

Journal of the North American Benthological Society. 15(1): 3–19.

Wondzell, S.M.; Swanson, F.J. 1996b. Seasonal and storm dynamics of the

hyporheic zone of a 4th-order mountain stream. II: Nitrogen cycling. Journal

of the North American Benthological Society. 15(1): 20–34.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

341

Afterward (by Fred Swanson)

This book examines the history of the community of scientists and land managers

working at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (Andrews Forest) though its first

50 years. Since the 50th anniversary of the Andrews Forest in 1998, the context and

composition of the Andrews Forest community and program have changed in

major ways, yet retain their essential mission and character. The summary themes

in the “Conclusions” of Max Geier’s history of the research and management

communities of the Andrews Forest provide useful dimensions for charting how

the program, the Andrews Forest group, and the larger contexts in which they

function, evolved in the 1998–2005 period.

The place

The Andrews Forest itself remained a compelling, charismatic landscape. The

towering Douglas-fir forests, with lush drapery of lichens and moss and the fast,

cold streams reminded scientists and land managers why their work was important,

and why to continue even in periods of bureaucratic and other struggles. From the

time of Roy Silen there remained a sense of, “We do this work in this place for this

place.”

The people

The Andrews Forest remained a seedbed for discovery built on the foundation of

long-term working relationships among scientists and land managers. Continuing

overlap of generations of scientists and managers working at the Andrews Forest

sustained the core culture of the program. For example, the spread of years in

which the signatory principal investigators (PIs) on the Long Term Ecological

Research (LTER) grant for 2002-2008 first began working at the Andrews Forest

spanned nearly three decades: Swanson (1972), Harmon (1981), Jones (1989),

Johnson (1996), and Barbara Bond (1999). Processes, such as preparation of the

LTER renewal grant proposal, were important opportunities for collaboration and

for evolution of a team’s work culture.

Over the 1998-2005 period, leadership of the research program shifted from

scientists whose roots with the Andrews Forest began in the International Biological Programme (IBP) era of the 1970s and in the early years of LTER to those

whose first contact with the forest began in the early 1990s, or even more recently.

In this period, the duties of forest director passed from Art McKee to Kari

O’Connell; those of LTER PI passed from Fred Swanson to Mark Harmon to
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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Barbara Bond (starting in 2006); and those of lead Pacific Northwest Research

Station (PNW Station) scientist passed from Fred Swanson to Sherri Johnson.

New Oregon State University (OSU) scientists and science leaders stepped forward

to direct important areas of research, such as Roy Haggerty (geosciences), Kate

Lajtha (botany and plant pathology), Jeff McDonnell (forest engineering), and

Elizabeth Sulzman (crop and soil science). In the Willamette National Forest, where

change in leadership is typically more frequent than in science positions, John

Cissel and then Jim Mayo passed duties as research liaison to Cheryl Friesen; Mary

Allison assumed duties as ranger of the McKenzie River Ranger District (the

combined Blue River and McKenzie Ranger Districts) from John Allen, and Dallas

Emch became supervisor of the Willamette National Forest.

Despite all this change, the main partnerships among workers in a given field,

among disciplines, and between research and land management remained strong

and productive.

Leadership and Organization

As the scope and complexity of the Andrews Forest facilities and operations has

grown over the history of the forest, leadership roles for the various parts of the

program were distributed across a core group of Forest Service and university

leaders making decisions on a consensus basis. This pattern persisted in the 1998-

2005 period, but the players shifted. Under the leadership of Mark Harmon as

LTER PI, the science team conducted business in a consistent series of meetings

scheduled over each year. The Executive Committee, composed of signatory PIs

plus the forest director, dealt with core management issues for the LTER program.

A “PI Powwow” of all investigators who manage research budgets was held twice

a year to cover budget planning (November) and research planning (May). Regular,

monthly meetings, open to all interested participants, continued to be the main

venue for conducting general business and for the Executive Committee to hear

from the group. The group continued other important opportunities to communicate internally and externally, including the annual June field day for sharing findings in the forest and the annual, day-long symposium on campus in the winter.

In addition, the research liaison managed quarterly meetings to guide the work

of the research-management partnership. Representatives of the leadership of the

Willamette National Forest, Eugene office of the Bureau of Land Management, and

the research community took part in these sessions.
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

343

The Andrews Forest LTER program has demonstrated its importance as a

training ground for science leadership. Such a program attracted people who like

working in interdisciplinary groups and addressing larger, socially-relevant questions. Work in this environment encouraged an intellectually and fiscally entrepreneurial spirit and collaboration across wide-ranging networks of colleagues.

Participants in the Andrews Forest program built on the spirit and leadership

experience there to become leaders in other programs, such as a new, OSU program in Ecosystem Informatics (applications of math and computer sciences in the

ecological sciences) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the

university, and new national science initiatives to develop networks of ecological

and hydrological observatories.

Shifting Context

The major regional and national science, management, and policy themes at the

time of the 50th anniversary of the Andrews Forest persisted through 2005, but

with notable developments. Science and policy issues related to global change,

especially climate and land use change, remained dominant. Federal forest policy

was still governed by the Northwest Forest Plan, which entered its second decade

with a series of retrospective assessments revealing low rates of forest cutting,

continued decline of the northern spotted owl despite increases in the extent of

old-forest habitat, and other expected or surprising findings. Thus, topics with

roots in basic science in the Andrews Forest in the 1970s reemerged as focal

points of public debate and policy in 1998–2005. This historical perspective raises

the question of what current work may have major impact on science and policy in

the future. The Blue River Landscape Study, based in part on use of natural disturbance regimes in landscape planning, for example, may contribute an approach that

complements planning that emphasizes the needs of individual species. This work

may influence future policy decisions with impact similar to the 1970s work on old

growth and northern spotted owls.

But the future of forestry in the region remains quite uncertain: What will be

the level of harvest from federal, state, and private lands in the context of a shifting

global marketplace, changing attitudes of citizens of the region, and other factors?

How will disturbance regimes of fire, insects, and other processes adjust to a

changing climate? How will altered disturbance regimes affect forests and watersheds? How will these aspects of changing social and environmental conditions

affect the relevance and usefulness of different research paths? The uncertainty

enveloping these questions seems to grow rather than diminish with time.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

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Large-scale planning and science programs with a footprint that includes the

Andrews Forest and Andrews Forest scientists provide a context for exploring new

research themes. For example, the Willamette River Basin Futures Project (Baker et

al. 2004), led by David Hulse (University of Oregon) and Stan Gregory, examined

the history of ecological change in the watershed over the past few centuries and

projected the consequences of three policy scenarios 50 years into the future.

Major programs on the horizon that have already engaged scientists who work at

the Andrews Forest include the National Ecological Observatory Network, Hydrological Observatories of the Consortium for Advancement of the Hydrological

Sciences, Inc., and revision of management plans for national forest of the region

and Bureau of Land Management lands in western Oregon. Participation in such

large-scale programs shows the relevance of the Andrews Forest program as a

source of concepts and technical knowledge. This work in large-scale projects

provides opportunities to extend and test concepts broadly, and it stimulates

thinking about new topics and new terrain.

Study Themes: Persistence–Flexibility

As of 2005, the Andrews Forest program continued to balance persistence on

perennial themes with attentiveness to the socially and scientifically relevant issues

of the day. In terms of persistence, the dominant research themes of the LTER

grant renewed in 2002 had been major themes at the Andrews Forest for several

decades: water; forest dynamics; disturbance by fire, floods, and other processes;

cycling of carbon and nutrients; and biological diversity. Applied research in 1998-

2005 focused on continuing the Blue River Landscape Plan and Study and silviculture studies initiated earlier in the 1990s.

Several new science and education programs originating in this period built on

the foundations of earlier work; highlights included:

• Barbara Bond and Mike Unsworth secured NSF funding to take a fresh

view of small, experimental watersheds with more than 50 years of

hydrology research. They are investigating the watersheds as airsheds by

sampling the chemistry of cool air draining out of the watersheds in order

to measure respiration in the entire forest ecosystem of the watershed.

• Sherri Johnson, Stan Gregory, and Linda Ashkenas have led the Andrews

Forest component of the Lotic Intersite Nitrogen Experiment (LINX),

involving many natural ecosystems across the United States and sites of

intensive land use, even cities. Isotopically labeled nitrogen is introduced to
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

345

streams and its fate is tracked downstream and into the adjacent terrestrial

plant and animal communities. The LINX study revealed high rates of

nitrogen uptake in streams and also transfer of nitrogen from streamwater

into terrestrial vegetation and animals rather far removed from the stream.

• Julia Jones, Mark Harmon, and others capitalized on the long, strong

history of information management in the Andrews Forest program to

initiate a new graduate education program in Ecosystem Informatics, which

brings together math, computer sciences, and earth and ecological sciences

from a dozen departments in OSU. This new program, funded by NSF

through an Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training grant and

the university, will train dozens of Ph.D. students and pioneer crossdisciplinary work among faculty.

• Fred Swanson and Kathleen Dean Moore (Philosophy, OSU), Director of

the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word,

developed a new collaboration between the Andrews Forest ecosystem

group and nature writers. This program, termed Long Term Ecological

Reflections and conducted in parallel with Long Term Ecological Research,

engages the practical knowledge of environmental sciences, the clarity of

philosophical analysis, and the expressive power of the written word to find

new ways to understand our relation with the natural world. Just like

scientists, writers visit the forest, collect observations, and publish their

findings. The writers visit long-term ecological reflection plots, such as a

site in Mark Harmon’s 200-year log composition experiment. In that setting

the first writer in residence, Robert Michael Pyle (2004), wrote that taking

the long view in ecological research and reflection requires “faith in the

future—even if you won’t be there to see it for yourself. ... Maybe looking

to the future is a way of hoping there will still be something to see when we

get there. Maybe it’s the only way to make sure of it.” A fitting description

of the spirit of work at the Andrews Forest.

Financial Picture

The funding picture for the Andrews Forest program has a long history of ups

and downs, relying on base-level funding from the principal partner institutions,

but new initiatives and even many ongoing, long-term projects have relied on

the uncertain world of competitive grants. During the 1998–2005 period, budget

crunches affected each of the partner institutions–PNW Station, Willamette
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National Forest, and OSU. The national forest substantially reduced staffing and

services, mainly as a consequence of the reduced amount of timber cut from the

national forest after 1990. Funding of OSU and the PNW Station also tightened in

general because of stable or declining budgets and increased costs. Perhaps the

most tenuous funding situation was the research-management partnership, particularly for the adaptive management area, which supported several long-term studies

of management of landscapes and young forest plantations. Despite the sometimes

gloomy financial climate, leaders of each institution continued to express strong

support for the Andrews Forest program.

Accomplishments

The Andrews Forest program was highly productive in the 1998-2005 period in

both traditional ways and in addressing themes new to the group. A constant

stream of journal articles and communications to a more general readership

emerged from the Andrews Forest. Jon Luoma (1999, 2006), a freelance writer,

published The Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem describing the

process of discovery about forest ecosystems using work at the Andrews Forest

as the dominant example of how the work is done and what has been discovered.

Leaders in the Andrews group were major players in regional, national, and international efforts to synthesize and communicate state-of-knowledge ideas on diverse

themes, including wood in rivers of the world (Gregory et al. 2003), the social and

ecological history and potential futures of the Willamette River basin in western

Oregon (Baker et al. 2004, Hulse et al. 2002), road ecology (Forman et al. 2003),

and use of bioregional assessments in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere in the

United States (Johnson et al. 1999). Studies in the research-management partnership, especially the Blue River Landscape Plan and Study (Cissel et al. 1999),

which explores the use of forest history to guide management, continued to draw

interest in terms of possible influence on future approaches to forest landscape

management.

The Future

Clearly the traditions of the Andrews Forest continue, beginning with the inspiration

drawn from the beautiful forest landscape itself, which remains a strong physical

and intellectual rallying point that nurtures and stimulates the community. The tradition of balancing long-term persistence in basic research with the need to address

science and management issues of the day has been sustained through several
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

347

generations of researchers and land managers working in close partnership. The

many benefits of working in this close partnership and the significance of the

Andrews Forest LTER program as a training ground for science leadership have

become more evident over the years. Openness to exploring new approaches in

science and education, and new linkages with the humanities, have enlivened the

program over the years, and recent developments are in keeping with this tradition.

The successes achieved through these aspects of the Andrews Forest program

reinforce the importance of keeping them a part of standard operating practice in

the Andrews Forest group in the future. In sum, the Andrews Forest program

continues with the necessary work.

Literature Cited

Baker, J.P.; Hulse, D.H.; Gregory, S.V. [et al.]. 2004. Alternative futures for

the Willamette River basin, Oregon. Ecological Applications. 14(2): 313–324.

Cissel, J.H.; Swanson, F.J.; Weisberg, P.J. 1999. Landscape management

using historical fire regimes: Blue River, Oregon. Ecological Applications.

9(4): 1217–1231.

Forman, R.T.T.; Sperling, D.; Bissonette, J.A. [et al.]. 2003. Road ecology:

science and solutions. Washington, DC: Island Press. 481 p.

Gregory, S.V.; Boyer, K.L.; Gurnell, A.M., eds. 2003. The ecology and management of wood in world rivers. American Fisheries Society, Symposium 37.

Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society. 431 p.

Hulse, D.; Gregory, S.; Baker, J.P., eds. 2002. Willamette River planning atlas:

trajectories of environmental and ecological change. 2nd ed. Oregon State

University Press. 182 p.

Johnson, K.N.; Swanson, F.J.; Herring, M.; Greene, S., eds. 1999. Bioregional

assessments: science at the crossroads of management and policy. Washington,

DC: Island Press. 395 p.

Luoma, J.R. 1999. The hidden forest: the biography of an ecosystem. New York:

Henry Holt and Co. 228 p.

Luoma, J.R. 2006. The hidden forest: the biography of an ecosystem. Corvallis,

OR: Oregon State University Press. 228 p. (Republished with a new foreword

by Jerry Franklin.)

Pyle, R.M. 2004. The long haul. Orion. 23(5): 70–71.
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

348

Index

A

Adaptive management, 233–240, 254–255, 258–259,

271–272, 276, 278–280, 289–290

Adaptive Management Areas (AMAs), 285–287

Alexander, Dave, 227

Allegheny National Forest, 270

Anderson, Ed, 54–55, 59-60, 62, 76, 226

Anderson, Norm, 113, 158, 159, 161, 184, 257

Anderson, Rolf, 227, 266–267, 273–276

Andrews Forest (see also, H.J. Andrews Experimental

Forest, or the Blue River Experimental Forest),

Administration of, 35

As candidate site for IBP, 92–94

As National Field Research Facility (NSF), 226

As part of Blue River Ranger District, 62, 100

Descriptions of, 53, 69–70, 91–92, 291, 322–323

Designation in Biosphere Reserve program, 148–

150

Educational outreach from, 59, 223–225, 227

Establishment agreement for (memo of understanding), 19, 34–35

Establishment of (as Blue River Experimental

Forest), 11

Establishment Report for, 29

Facilities improvements, 125, 138–139, 220–221,

250–254, 260, 317, 322–323, 328–329

Facilities grant (NSF), 168–177

Field Tours of, 209–210, 263, 280–281, 301–302,

315–316, 320–321, 330

Fifty-year anniversary of, 3–4, 329-330

Fire history of, 10–11

Geology of, 9–10

Housing facilities on, 95, 114, 125–127, 138, 253,

255, 317

Land Base Inventory for, 239

Logging plan for, 26, 77, 179

Management of, 77, 239–240

Map of, 10

Memorandums of Understanding for, 11, 29, 48–

49, 54, 82–83, 169–172, 227

Naming of, 22

National Advisory Committee for, 230-231, 239–

240

Oral History Project about, 1–4, 329

Origins of 2–3, 6, 15

Pairing with Three Sisters Wilderness, 149

Panoramic photos of, 15

Promotion of, 53, 69–70, 288–289

Proposed closure of, 56, 79, 82–83, 89–90,

109–111

Purpose of, 19

Rededication and renaming of, 46–47, 50–51

Research proposals for, 83–84, 288–289

Road system of, 26, 291

Seasonal conditions in, 11–13

Site Development Committee for, 251–252

Site director for, 123–124, 170, 239–240

Soil survey on, 84

Species native to, 11–13

Timber sales on, 35, 48–49, 179, 206, 238, 291

Vegetation classification on, 84–85

Andrews Group,

And IBP, 94–96, 109–110

Attrition, 176, 240–241, 299–300, 303–304

Authority over Andrews Forest of, 170–172, 176,

239, 325

Biomimicry in, 303–304, 315–316, 322–323, 331

Composition of, 94, 126–127, 130–131, 168–169,

238–239, 249–250, 253–254, 299–300, 306, 310–311,

314–315, 325–327

Community identity of, 163–164, 254, 291–292, 299–

303, 314–315, 321, 324–325, 329

Critics of, 210–212, 224–225, 328

Data Management Group in, 237, 291–299, 329
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349

Educational outreach by, 87, 205, 223–224, 311–312

Funding for, 92–95, 119–120, 129–130, 135, 137,

166, 167–175, 177–178, 182, 188–190, 224–225,

243–245, 250–252, 256, 302, 314, 325, 345–346

Generational transitions in, 130–131, 136, 145–146,

200–201, 240–241, 253–254, 259–260, 314–315

HJA Daze and, 301, 321

Leadership of, 130–133, 136, 146, 172, 201–203,

240–243, 254–255, 260–261, 310–311, 321–322,

324–325-326, 328, 330–331, 341–342

Legislative inquiry regarding, 224

Local Area Network for, 294–295

Monthly meetings of, 237–239, 249, 259–261, 273,

289, 301, 321–322, 326

Origins of, 71–72, 74–76, 80–85, 89–90, 92,

103–104

Postdoctoral appointments with, 94–95, 129,

142–143, 203, 240, 302, 307, 313

Phoenix proposal of, 241–244

Public outreach efforts of, 205–206, 208–209,

251–252, 265, 273–274

Recruitment into, 118–119, 122–125, 128–130,

141–142, 146, 189, 199–203, 213–214, 217–218,

222–223, 225–228, 230–233, 253–254, 256–257,

260–264, 267, 269–271, 291–292, 299–301,

303–304, 306–312, 314–315, 317–318, 321–322

Research initiatives of, 117–118, 136, 158–165,

196–201, 241–244, 249–250

Relations with forest managers, 62, 65, 83,

111–112, 199–200, 203–207, 214–215, 220–221,

225–226, 228–233, 251–252, 255, 277–279,

289–290, 315–316, 325

Staff reductions, 176, 276, 299–300, 303–304,

306, 326

Andrews, Horace J. [Hoss], 11, 17–19, 20, 46–47, 49

Applied research, 57, 60, 79–80, 118–119, 124–125,

135, 158–163, 165–166, 182–183, 197–198, 201–

202, 216–218, 220, 231–233, 248–249, 256, 265,

282

Aquatics Project (in IBP), 159–160

Aquatic-terrestrial interactions, 191–192, 195

Army Corps of Engineers, 17–18, 34, 36, 44–45

Ash, Brit, 16, 38

Ashkenas, Linda, 165, 249, 257–259, 280–281, 344

AuCoin, Les, 251–252

Aufderheide, Robert, 25–27, 33, 59

Augusta Creek drainage, 86–87

Augusta Creek Landscape Project, 273, 278–279,

282, 286–287

Auman, Nick, 189–190

B

Baseline data, 44

Basic research, 60, 79–80, 203–204

Beatty, Joe, 249

Bermuda Biological Station, 130

Berntsen, Carl, 53, 58, 71, 173

Biodiversity, 178

Biosphere Reserve Program, 149, 288

BLM (Bureau of Land Management), 211–212, 217

Blue River, 8, 16, 57, 105, 127, 208–209, 262, 320

Blue River Experimental Forest (see also, Andrews

Forest), 11, 19, 26–27, 31, 45–46

Blue River Landscape Project, 288–289

Blue River Ranger District, 45, 54, 58–60, 62, 64,

65–66, 78, 100, 153–154, 162–163, 206–210, 214–

215, 222–228, 232, 239, 258–259, 261, 263

Landscape management strategy, 287–288, 343

Relations with researchers, 62, 65, 83, 111–112,

206–207, 228–233, 234–238, 240, 242, 261, 264,

267–271, 274, 277–278, 315–316, 327

Research liaison position at, 264–266, 270–272

Blue River Watershed, 34–35, 76, 180

Bond, Barbara, 341–342, 344

Bormann, Bernard, 240–241, 285

Briegleb, Phil, 8, 15, 26, 157

Brookhaven National Laboratory, 121

Brown, George, 144, 259

Bruckart, J.R., 20, 29

Buckman, Robert, 157, 170–171
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

350

Buffer strips, 160

Burchart, J.R., 48

Burditt, Lynn, 249, 259, 261–266, 271, 273–274, 276,

285, 328

C

Camp Belknap, 16

Carpenter Lookout, 1–2, 3

Carpenter Mountain, 9, 15, 16

Carpenter Saddle, 9, 32

Carson, Rachel, 150

Cascade Center for Ecosystem Management, 271–

274, 276–278, 282

Cascade Head Experimental Forest, 26–27, 48, 76–77

Caswell, Jim, 225-227, 229

Central Cascades Adaptive Management Area, 279–

280, 285–287

Chapman, C.S., 14

Cissel, John, 252, 259, 266–267, 269–273, 275–6,

278–279, 282–284, 328

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 16

Clark College, 74

Clean Waters Act (1972), 150

Clearcutting, 18, 37, 43, 50–51, 53–4, 58, 68–69, 76,

106–107, 117–118, 136, 178–180, 233–234, 249–250

Clearwater National Forest, 262

Coconino National Forest, 225

Cohen, Warren, 243–244, 283

Collaborative research, 159–163, 202–203, 222, 259–

260, 291–292

Colorado State University, 294, 313

Columbia River Intertribal Council, 189, 277

Cooperative agreements, 25, 34, 48, 70–71, 138–139,

169–171, 254

Coniferous Biome Project (see IBP)

Cornell University, 307

Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, 68, 116, 123, 138–

139, 301

Cowlin, Robert W., 48

Cromack, Kermit, 115, 129, 170, 222

Cummins, Ken, 173, 187-188

Cutting units (see also, logging sales)

D

Data Management, 237, 291–299, 315–316

Decomposition, 141–142, 178, 182-183, 189, 246–

247

Defazio, Peter, 224, 251–252

Denison, Bill, 140–141, 152–153

Disturbance events, 61, 109, 178, 246–247, 290

Diversified management concept, 245–246

Dunford, E.G. [Jerry], 45–46, 65, 67–68

Dyrness, Ted, 56, 67–68, 70–74, 76–78, 83–85, 88–

89, 96–97, 100, 111–112, 115, 133, 141, 154, 156,

181, 198, 253, 325

E

Ecological Society of America, 187, 307, 313–314

Ecosystem management, 228–233, 252–253, 264–

265, 271–272, 278–279, 284–285, 287–291, 329, 331

Ecosystems research, 94–95, 101–102, 109, 115–116,

141–142, 201–203, 212–213, 218–219, 222–223,

228–233, 249–250, 294–295

Emmingham, Bill, 129, 305

Endangered Species Act, 151, 218

Environmental Protection Agency, 150–151

Environmental Remote Sensing and Application

(ERSA) Laboratory, 295

Eubanks, Steve, 153–154, 162-163, 175, 200–201,

206–207, 209–210, 227–233, 236-237, 239–243, 249,

258, 261, 262, 264, 280, 304

Evergreen State College (WA), 307

Experimental Ecological Reserve (EER, Facilities

Grant), 172
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351

Experimental Forests

Closures of, 24, 48, 110

Development of, 25

Reopening of, 25

F

Federal Land Management Act (1977), 151

Ferrell, Bill, 250, 283-284, 306

Field research, 22, 27-28, 56, 80-81, 85-88, 91-92,

119-120, 169, 191-192, 239-240, 275, 317

Fire lookouts, 15

Fish and Wildlife Service, 189, 218

Fishing, 27, 30, 306-307

Fisheries, 131-132

Flathead National Forest, 263

Floods, 17, 56, 89-92, 103-109

Flumes, 45-46, 106-107, 258

Fogel, Robert, 129

Forest dynamics research, 282-284

Forest management research, 66, 201-202, 226-227

Forest Research Council, 14-15

Forest Research Laboratory (Corvallis), 79-80, 82, 89

Forest-Stream interactions, 155, 178, 204-205, 235-

236

Forest succession, 34

Forest Supervisor, 59

Forest Science Data Bank, 292, 295, 299

As LTER prototype, 295, 297, 329

ERSA Laboratory links with, 295

Forest Service links with, 298

GIS links with, 294-295

LAN links with, 294

Information sharing through, 297, 315, 329

Personal Computers and, 295

Remote sensing links with, 294-295

Web-based access to, 295, 297

Forestry Sciences Laboratory, Corvallis (see FSL,

Corvallis)

Forsman, Eric, 217-218

Franklin, Jerry, 56, 70-78, 84-86, 89-90, 96-97,

111-112, 115, 120-121, 123-124, 132-133, 141-143,

148-150, 154, 156-157, 168-169, 172, 175, 181, 188,

190, 193, 197, 198-199, 202-203, 221-222, 240, 243,

246, 250, 265, 283, 301, 306, 320, 325-327

Fraser Experimental Forest, 248-249

Fredriksen, Dick, 86-87, 104-106, 117, 122-123, 171,

181, 320

French Pete controversy, 63, 99-100

Froehlich, Hank, 160, 184

FSL, Corvallis (Forestry Sciences Laboratory), 114-

115, 211-212, 239, 271, 309, 319

Funding, 21, 24, 55, 95-97, 115-116, 216

G

Gashweiler, Jay, 16, 44, 62-63, 113, 181

Gedney, Donald R., 45-46

Geographic Information System (GIS), 295-296

Ghetto in the Meadow, 251

Glacier National Park, 202

Gordon, John, 262

Gould, Stephen Jay, 131

Grant, Gordon, 117, 259, 274, 283-285, 300, 308-

309, 313, 317-320

Gratkowski, Hank, 32-33, 38, 56-58

Great Smokies National Park, 202

Gregory, Stan, 115, 130, 131-132, 158-159, 163, 165,

175, 184, 189, 221-222, 252, 257-258, 274, 280-281,

283, 294, 313, 320, 344

Grier, Charles [Chuck], 115, 129, 306

Griffiths, Bob, 249, 259, 309, 310-311

Gypsy Camp, 114, 125-126
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

352

H

Habitat Conservation Areas (HCAs), 218–219, 247–

248, 272

Habitat restoration, 255–256

Hall, J. Alfred, 20

Hall, Jim, 113, 131–132, 158–159, 184, 222

Hampshire College, 308

Harmon, Mark, 199–211, 241, 244, 249-250, 259,

283–284, 304, 329, 345

Harr, Dennis, 143–145, 163, 283, 300, 320

Harvard University, 157

Harvard Forest, 203

Hatfield, Mark, 224, 251-252

Hawkins, Chuck, 189

Henshaw, Don, 144, 293, 298, 316

Herbicide spraying, 215

Hett, Joan, 129, 141–142

H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (see also, Andrews

Forest)

Holbo, Dick, 129

Hydrology, 66, 68–69, 102, 178

Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, 116–117, 131,

138, 240

I

IBP (International Biological Programme, Coniferous

Biome), 6, 56, 89–90, 92, 94–97, 106-107, 109–110,

112–122, 126–127, 129–131, 133–134, 136–138,

140–142, 144–146, 152, 159, 167, 181–183, 212–

213, 217–218, 221, 259, 292, 305–307, 311, 325, 341

Idaho State University, 187–188

Information management, 178

Intake studies, 189

Interagency cooperation, 230–231, 269–270, 277, 326

Interagency Report (Thomas Report, Owl Report),

218, 246–249

Interdisciplinary research, 56, 95–96, 115, 130–133,

135, 141–142, 202–203, 294–295

International Biological Programme (see IBP)

International Long-Term Ecological Research

(ILTER), 147

Iowa State University, 262

J

Janda, Dick 192

Johns Hopkins University, 236, 301, 308, 319

Johnson, Sherri, 309, 312–313, 329, 344

Jones, Julia, 249, 256–257, 259, 283, 292, 307–310,

313, 319, 345

K

Kobayashi, Shigeo, 238

Kenops, Darryl, 276

Kerrick, Mike, 16, 54–55, 62-65, 76, 99–100, 153–

154, 158, 200–201, 225–228, 233–235, 241, 264,

272, 274, 276, 279–281, 327

L

Labor supply, 21, 23–24

Laboratory research, 56, 78–80, 89–90

Lamberti, Gary, 193

Landscape ecology, 275

Landscape studies, 204–205, 243, 249

Landscape management, 204–205, 221–223, 243–245,

268, 279, 291

Landslides, 106–108

Lattin, Jack, 249, 252, 259, 283

Leuking, Mary, 240–241

Levno, Al, 44–45, 83, 87, 104–106, 126, 259

Lienkaemper, George, 249, 319

Log decomposition, 179, 196–201, 203–210

Logging effects, 181

Logging plan, 26, 29, 34, 37, 48–49, 56, 67–68, 180

Logging sales (see also, timber sales), 40–42, 49, 62,

88–89, 91

Logging slash, 160
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

353

Long-term data management, 107–109, 135–136,

205–206, 216–217, 237, 291–299

Long-Term Ecological Measurements Conference

(1977), 173

Long-term ecological monitoring, 146–152, 205,

216–217

Long Term Ecological Reflections, 345

Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) programs

(NSF), 152, 166, 170, 174–176, 177–184, 197–198,

211, 231–232, 237, 240–241, 252, 256, 262–263,

274, 288, 292, 294–296, 307, 309, 312, 326, 341

Long Term Ecosystem Productivity (LTEP) sites, 273

Long-term forest planning (NFMA), 166–167

Long-term research, 25, 107–109, 117–118, 135,

142–143, 146–152, 158–163, 177–183, 193–198,

201–203, 210–211, 220–221, 275, 303–304

Long-term site productivity, 240, 243–244, 275–276

Long-term vegetation plots, 198

Lookout Creek, 7–9, 16, 30, 49–50, 55, 76, 105, 204,

231, 320

Lookout Creek drainage, 26, 90–91, 128

Louisiana State University, 310

LTER (see Long-Term Ecological Research)

Luchessa, Karen, 207

Luquillo Experimental Forest, 313, 329

M

Mack Creek, 30, 113, 132, 160, 186, 222, 231

Managed stands, 240

Man and the Biosphere Committee (UNESCO, Project

8), 148

Mann, Ken, 187

Maser, Chris, 211–212, 230–233, 240, 246

Mason, Jerry, 227

McCain, Cindy, 249

McCardle, Richard, 47–48

McComb, Bill, 249

McCullough, Dale, 189

McKee, Art, 112, 120–125, 142–143, 168–173, 191–

192, 202–3, 224, 240, 249, 252, 259, 264–266, 271–

274, 276, 283, 301, 307, 311, 326–328

McKenzie Bridge, 16, 31, 227, 231

McKenzie Bridge Ranger District, 16, 38, 54

McKenzie Working Circle, 48–49

McRae Creek, 30

McRae Trailer, 207

Mersereau, Ross, 87, 128, 151, 320

Meslow, Charles E., 217, 284

Michigan State University, 131, 173, 187, 270

Minshall, Wayne, 187–188

Mitchell, Russ, 56–57

Modeling (of ecosystems), 139–140, 141–144, 193–

195, 213, 221, 306, 316–317

Moldenke, Andy, 124, 259, 283, 309–311

Moreau, John, 207

Moore, Kelly, 165

Mount Hood National Forest, 229–233, 262–263

Mount St. Helens, 179, 190–195, 216–217, 237–238,

263, 319, 327–328

Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act (1960), 97

Munger, Thornton, 14, 18, 23, 25

Murkowski, Frank, 249–251

N

Naiman, Bob, 189

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

(NASA), 283, 288

National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 100–102,

150–151, 263

National Forest Management Act ,151, 166

National Park Service, 202, 262

National Science Foundation (see NSF)

Natural Areas, 29

Nelson, John, 276

New Deal, 16
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

354

New Forestry, 248–249

New Perspectives program, 275

Norris, Logan, 169, 171, 308–309

Northern Spotted Owl, 12, 168, 217–220, 247–248,

265, 280, 284, 328

Northwest Forest Plan (1996), 254–255, 277–86,

288–289, 343

Nussbaum, Ron, 129

Nutrient cycling, 140, 211–213, 222, 235–236

NSF, 112, 116, 132–133, 137–138, 148–152, 167,

168–177, 184–185, 190, 216, 222–223, 231–232,

251–252, 294, 302–303, 309, 311, 325

O

Oberlin College, 312

Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 277

O&C Forest Lands, 217–218

Oak Ridge National Laboratories, 131, 187, 202, 213,

261–262, 301

Odum, Tom, 213

Ogawa, Makoto, 212

Old-growth characteristics, 223, 234–235

Old-growth forest, 12, 15, 18, 19, 30, 40–41, 44, 50,

67–68, 75, 98, 120–122, 141–142, 153, 161, 178,

180–182, 211–213, 217–220, 221–224, 233–238,

241–249, 264–265

Olympic National Park, 164

Oregon Agricultural College (OAC), 13

Oregon State College (OSC), 14, 18, 22–23, 25, 34,

55–56, 71–74, 79–80

Oregon State University (OSU), 74, 80–81, 83, 86–87,

89–90, 113–115, 118–119, 123, 131–132, 140–141,

144–145, 153, 157, 160, 167–171, 189, 199, 202–

203, 207, 210–214, 217–218, 222, 226, 229–230,

259–260, 262, 277, 294, 301–303, 306–312, 314,

325–326

Orlando, Cynthia, 249

Outdoor Recreation Resource Review

Commission, 97

Overton, Scott, 142–144

Owl Report (1990, see interagency report)

P

Pacific Northwest Region (see also Region 6), 18-19,

167–168, 226, 232–233, 237, 272, 273

Pacific Northwest Research Station (see PNW

Station)

Pacific Northwest Station (see PNW Station)

Pacific University, 56

Peace Corps, 307

Peavy, George Wilcox, 14

Pennsylvania State University, 130, 270, 301

Perry, Dave, 214–215, 240–241, 244, 249

PNW Station (Pacific Northwest Research Station), 9,

14, 17, 18, 23, 25, 34, 54, 65-67, 70–71, 74, 211

New Perspectives program at, 275

Relations with NFS, 111, 157, 170–171, 179–180,

227, 277, 326

Reorganization of, 24, 47–48, 78-79, 82–83, 157–

158

Research Information Services, 206–207, 236

Research Institutes at, 273–274

Research priorities of, 24, 70, 78, 85, 91–92, 96–

99, 101–102, 109–110, 118–119, 145, 157–158,

167, 169–170, 190, 222, 227, 240–241, 243–244,

302, 325

Precipitation records, 44–45

Prescribed burns, 214–215, 241–243

Primary production, 222, 235–236

Project 8 (UNESCO Man and the Biosphere

Committee), 148–150

Public Land Law Review Commission, 100–102

Pulao, Vince, 207, 209–210, 266–267

“Pulse” events, 119, 164, 190, 199, 202, 222, 248,

326

Q

R

Recreation, 44–45, 97–98

Rededication ceremony (1953), 46–47

Reed College, 318
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

355

Reed, Ken, 129

Reeves, Gordie, 319

Reference stands, 146–149, 240–241, 265

Reforestation, 34–5

Regeneration studies, 34–5, 43, 58, 74, 77, 178

Region 6 (see also Pacific Northwest Region), 18–19,

25, 47–48

Regional Forester, 18

Regional Forest Service Advisory Council, 47–48

Remillard, Suzanne, 293

Remote sensing, 44, 283-284, 295

Replanting, 58

Research forestry, 29–30

Research Natural Areas, 154, 156–157

Richie, Jeff, 129

Richmond National Forest, 270

River Continuum Grant (NSF), 184–190

River Continuum hypothesis, 184–185, 187–188

River continuum study, 179, 184–190, 195

Roads, 21, 26, 28, 36–37, 39–40, 42, 50, 53, 58–59,

67–68, 91–92, 101, 106–107, 136–137, 179–181,

216–217

Romancier, Bob, 171

Rothacher, Jack, 45–46, 53–64, 65–66, 69, 74, 76,

84–85, 87–89, 96, 109–112, 181, 325

Rothacher, Jean, 54–55, 65–66, 70–71

Running, Steve, 127, 306–307, 309

Ruth, Robert H., 26–27, 58, 66, 71

S

Salvage logging, 192

San Jose State University, 312

Santa Barbara Oil Spill, 150

Savelich, Mike 37, 40, 209

School for Marine Biology, 131

Schowalter, Tim, 259, 302–303, 310

Scientific forestry, 5, 20, 29–30, 60–61, 99–100,

289–290

Second-growth forests, 24–25, 98, 121, 178, 180

Sedell, Jim, 115, 129–130, 131–132, 158–159,

184–188, 190, 202–203, 222, 230–231, 270, 284, 320

Seedling mortality, 37

Selective cutting, 18

Sierra Club, 101–2

Silen, Roy, 1–2, 6, 16, 20–22, 25-32, 35–36, 38–46,

51, 53, 56, 57, 68, 73, 180, 325

Small watersheds, 102

Snowbrush, 214–215

Snow cabin, 44–45

Snow conditions, 31, 75, 145–146, 255

Snow laboratory, 17, 34, 36

Soft-money appointments, 96-97, 199-200, 213–214,

243–244, 302–304, 308, 309–310, 314, 326

Soil movement, 68–69, 106–107

Soils, 178

Sollins, Phil, 115, 129, 212–215, 240–241, 294, 320

Spies, Tom, 249, 283–285

Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the

Written Word, 345

Stafford, Susan, 259, 292, 294–295, 297–298, 310

Stanford University, 310

State University of New York, 270

Stoltenberg, Carl, 210, 259

Storm watch, 163

Strand, Mary Ann, 129

Steinman, Al, 165, 193

Stream ecology, 131, 161, 184–185, 235–236, 314

Stream Team, 158–163, 165, 184, 186, 203-204, 255–

256, 320

Streamflow gauging, 87, 107–108

Stroud Water Research Laboratory, 179, 187

Sustained Yield Forest Management Act of 1944, 24

Sustained Yield targets, 48–49
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-687

356

Suwaya, Dick, 252

Swanson, Fred, 114–115, 129–130, 186, 190–193,

197–198, 242–244, 249, 252, 254–255, 259, 264–

266, 270–274, 276, 283–285, 294, 301, 309, 313,

318–320, 327–328, 330, 345

Swarzman, Gordon, 129

Syracuse University, 56–57, 262, 294

T

Tarrant, Robert, 25, 80, 156, 157, 170–171

Technology transfer, 40–41, 44, 61–63, 111–112,

158–163, 197, 264–265, 282

Thomas Report (see, interagency report)

Three Sisters Wilderness Area, 99-100, 149, 173,

288–289

Timber sales (see also, logging sales, 31, 37–39, 43,

45, 49–50, 179, 216–217

Tracy, Diane, 152–153

Trails, 31

Trailer camps (housing conditions), 78, 85, 125–127,

138, 207, 317

Trappe, Jim, 211–212, 232, 240

Tree canopy research, 152–153, 231, 236

Triska, Frank, 115, 129, 184

Tucker, Gabriel, 259, 305–306, 309

U

Unemployment Relief Act of 1933, 16

Uneven-age management study, 307

University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 133

University of Arizona, 306

University of California, Berkeley, 81, 86–87

University of California, Riverside, 240

University of California, Santa Barbara, 256, 308

University of California, Santa Cruz, 311

University of Colorado, 307

University of Georgia, 121–122, 301

University of Michigan, 157

University of Minnesota, 63–64, 81, 157

University of Montana, 307, 313

University of North Carolina, 213

University of Oklahoma, 313

University of Oregon, 114, 130–131, 318–319

University of Pennsylvania, 306

University of Pittsburgh, 187

University of Tennessee, 131, 202, 213, 301

University of Washington 14, 94–95, 112–115, 118–

119, 139–141, 145, 159, 186, 189, 213, 240

University of Wisconsin, 141

Urban growth, 70–71

U.S. Geological Survey, 131, 192, 258, 319

Utah State University, 189

V

Vannote, Robin, 179, 187–188

Vegetation succession, 98, 178, 189

Volunteerism, 139, 163–164, 208, 216–217

W

Ward, Amelia, 189, 193

Ward, Milt, 189, 193

Waring, Dick, 80–81, 86, 112–113, 115, 119–120,

122–123, 132–133, 139, 141–142, 167–171, 173,

188, 213, 222, 302, 306, 320

Warren, Charles, 187

Washington State College, 14

Washington State University, 74

Watershed studies, 17, 22, 45, 49–50, 55, 66–70, 74–

75, 87, 102, 104–106, 117, 168, 306–308, 320

Wenatchee National Forest, 230

Wesleyan University, 310

Western Oregon Research Center (at Corvallis), 26

Wilderness Act, 91, 100

Wilderness protection, 97–99

Wildlife, 44, 66, 113, 178, 181, 211–212, 215–217,

233–234

Wildman, Randy, 165
Necessary Work: Discovering Old Forests, New Outlooks, and Community on the Andrews Forest

357

Willamette National Forest, 1, 9, 26, 34, 44, 49–50,

53–54, 58–59, 91–92, 99–100, 103, 118, 136, 153–

154, 158, 162, 169–171, 180–182, 199–200, 216–

217, 226–227, 239–240, 267, 271, 277, 302, 326–327

Willamette National Forest Isolation Block, 244

Willamette National Forest Land Management Plan

(1990), 279–280

Willamette National Forest Riparian Management

Guide, 277–278, 280

Willamette National Forest Riparian Task Force, 204–

205

Willamette National Forest Supervisor, 153–154, 158,

200–201, 225–228, 264, 274–276

Willamette Research Center (at Corvallis), 71, 78–80

Willamette River Basin Futures Project, 344

Wind River (WA), 74

Wind River Experimental Forest, 222

Winter conditions, 31, 44–45

Wissmar, Bob, 129

Wheaton College, 72–73

Wolman, Gordon [Reds], 237, 301, 308, 319

Woods Hole (MA), 173, 189, 301

Woody debris, 158–163, 180, 182–184, 240, 245, 279

Working conditions, 32-33, 38–39, 75, 104–106, 145–

146, 238, 255

World War Two, 23–24, 25

Wustenberg, Don, 16, 44

X

Y

Yale University, 25–6, 56, 121, 240, 262

Youngberg, Chet, 73

Young stands, 178, 180, 211–212, 246, 249–250, 275
Pacific Northwest Research Station

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