New OSU forest research institute to address challenges facing timber communities like SH

Scott Swanson

Thomas Maness stands in a grove of hardwood trees on a slope near the South Santiam River, east of Cascadia, and gazes skyward.

“This stand needs treatment,” says the dean of the Oregon State University College of Forestry, gesturing toward the boughs above. “It’s a hardwood stand that has about reached its age. The trees are going to start dying and then what are you going to do?”

This particular grove includes lots of alder, which has “a lot of value,” he notes. It also provides habitat for birds and other animals that isn’t common in the Willamette National Forest, where many acres are filled with mature Douglas firs and few hardwoods.

The stand is “atypical for this region,” Maness says. “So we want to protect that but, at the same time, we want to generate economics. So how can those two things work together?”

That question is the impetus behind the creation of a new Institute for Working Forest Landscapes, a “world-class research and outreach center for healthy landscapes” that the OSU College of Forestry is in the process of establishing in various locations throughout Oregon, primarily in the forest east of Sweet Home. It will be done in collaboration with other universities, private landowners and managers, and the U.S. Forest Service.

“It’s bigger than Sweet Home,” said Cindy Glick, USFS Sweet Home District ranger. “We will be a part of it, but so will communities like Oakridge and Blue River – they’re in a similar situation. We hope to be a major part of the work because of location, location, location. We are so close to OSU and we have a lot of infrastructure ready for the university to come and help us with.”

Maness, who spent three days in Sweet Home last week with OSU faculty and U.S. Forest Service representatives to discuss the project, said the research institute will likely encompass 100,000 acres which, he hopes, will include private as well as federal lands across the state.

“This is not just public lands we’re talking about,” he said. “That interface and checkerboard structure of the landscape is really important to us.”

The institute’s purpose, college officials say, is to develop ways to better utilize forest resources by balancing ecological, social and economic needs. It is a response to “a change in attitude around the state,” said Maness, who has a reputation for innovative thinking in the world of forestry, particularly development of forest policies and practices that balance traditional production with stewardship of natural resources.

“There’s a real focus on issues around working landscapes,” he said. “Just a few years ago, all anybody wanted to talk about was protecting ecosystems. That’s turned around. We’re still interested in protecting ecosystems, but we’re dependent on the land and the land is dependent on us. It’s not just a wild landscape out there.”

In other words, people are a big part of the forestry picture.

“There’s a mandate in our code of ethics, as foresters, that says we work for future generations,” Maness said. “Everything we do, we have to consider the impact on future generations. That’s what forestry is about. You don’t need forestry to go out and cut trees. You need forestry when you start thinking about the other objectives here.”

Though development of the institute will extend over years, and exact locations have yet to be determined, a detailed plan has been written, outlining its basic structure and focus.

The premise is that “individual and community livelihoods are intimately linked to the health and productivity of surrounding landscapes regardless of ownership boundaries.”

“The big idea here is that we really need to change the way we think about landscapes,” Maness said. “This requires making communities and people part of the landscape, instead of separate. In the past, the thought was trying to get people out of the landscape.”

A major goal is to develop collaborative management of both public and private forestlands that will produce economical, biological and socially healthy conditions that will benefit both the forests and nearby communities. Another goal is to increase public awareness of the need for good stewardship of forests.

OSU Assistant Professor Emily Jane Davis, who has been involved in a number of collaborative forest-management projects east of Sweet Home in the last few years, and who recently joined the Forestry Department as an Extension agent specializing in collaborative natural resource management, said “stewardship” has been a “value” since the U.S. Forest Service was founded in 1905.

“They tended to use the word ‘conservation’ then or ‘wise use of resources,’ but I think that’s what they meant,” she said.

Response to Competing Demands

“I think stewardship is more important today than ever, because we know there are a lot of competing demands for our forests – like land conversion, loss of working forest land, climate change – these are some of the things that threaten the productivity and health of forest lands. And we also are living with the legacy of some past forest management decisions that today pose a lot restoration challenges.

“It can be really complicated to figure out: What’s the best approach? How should we restore this landscape not only to make up for the past, but to make it a more resilient forest and ensure its productivity?”

The institute has four stated goals (see page 13): to improve the health of rural communities and citizens, to increase Oregon’s competitiveness in wood products, to improve the health of ecosystems through a “landscape” approach to forest management, and increasing the public’s trust in forest management by government agencies.

Wide Focus

It will be organized into four areas, each with its own research budget and annual call for proposals for new research and technological development. It will be overseen by an advisory board, which will “provide a cross section of expertise and stakeholder interests” aimed at developing research priority and collaborative research partnerships.

Practically, the institute’s focus will be varied.

Improving Forest Management

First, it will examine ways to improve management for both economy and ecology. Participants will research issues such as “financial management of plantations, growth and yield modeling, reforestation, forest operations and biodiversity management, as well as how private lands can be managed more effectively to achieve overall landscape management goals by using markets for ecosystems services and other incentive-based systems.”

Boost for Private Landowners?

Dave Furtwangler, president of Cascade Timber Consultanting, which manages 145,000 acres of private timberland, mostly in east Linn County, said that the Institute’s research may be able to help the Forest Service implement goals that were part of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan but, he said, have gotten little follow-through.

“The big owners around here are the federal folks,” he said. “To me it just seems like the intent of (the NWFP) was they were supposed to try to do some other things to try to move a little bit of wood. Most of the time, they’ll put up a sale, there will be a legal challenge and they’ll shut it down. They are moving some wood, but it’s just a fraction of the growth that occurs.

Furtwangler said the success of the institute could result in benefits for private landowners: keeping the timber industry active by increasing the flow of wood from federal forests.

“From our perspective, it means jobs for people we hire who can’t work all the time, which will keep the workforce healthier and encourage folks to stay in business, keep themselves available,” he said. “We want a healthy workforce. It can’t be just us. There has to be others.

“The way we look at it, this will help keep the mills alive and available for other activities that go on around here.”

‘Working Landscapes’

The institute, secondly, will research the “myriad” of ways that local economies and people’s lives are interconnected with public and private “working landscapes” and how local economies and lives can be improved through collaborative development of both timber and non-timber forest products, including ecosystem services, recreation and tourism. A significant part of this will involve “providing the research to help rebuild trust in public and private land management.”

Utilizing Local Expertise

Eric White, an assistant professor in the College of Forestry who specializes in the economics of how people interact with natural resources, said Sweet Home has “so much knowledge of the land from people in the forest sector.

“It’s a great resource and one I think would really be helpful.”

Collaboration goes far beyond decision-makers, Davis said. Public land managers, she said, should be considering economic viability when they start planning projects.

“They usually don’t start really talking about it until it’s further down the line and then you’re stuck with whatever decisions were made by your resource specialists. That’s why collaborative groups should include businesses much more if they can.

“Sweet Home has several really high-capacity loggers who are really skilled, who have grown and changed their businesses in response to the environment they’re in. They have so much knowledge about the land out there and so much knowledge, particularly, about what are you going to get if you do that and what’s the economic viability going to be? It’s an amazing resource that isn’t taken advantage of enough. People like that need to be brought into the conversation and often aren’t and all these insights they have usually aren’t included.”

Expertise from Academia

Maness and Glick said university faculty and students, together with Forest Service experts, will play a vital role as well.

“The faculty at the university are key,” Maness said. “Research and teaching faculty are sort of the idea generators. Students will play a dual role – this will be part of their training and they will also do research.”

Other significant contributions are expected from U.S. Forest Service researchers and other schools, especially the University of Oregon’s Ecosystem Workforce Program, which has a similar focus to that of the new OSU institute, and the UO School of Architecture.

Maness said OSU will issue calls for research proposals this fall, with $1 million set aside to fund projects that would begin in the winter or spring.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to do that every year,” he said. “We’ve got a million dollars set aside right now for this call and that’ll grow every year if this is successful and we’re doing good science and asking good questions. We want to do this annually. You do this for five years and you’ll have a lot of projects going on the landscape.”

Long-Term Effort

He said most results of the research efforts will be long-term – “20 years, 50 years.”

“This is the type of research that needs to be done,” Maness said. “But at the the same time we can’t have an institute that isn’t going to give you answers for 50 years. Nobody’s going to do that.”

Consequently, studies will range from multi-year Ph.D- and master’s-level research to shorter projects, which, he said, will always be planned with the thought of “How can we set this up so we can revisit it against in five years, 10 years?

“That’s what forestry research is all about. There’s plots all over the landscape throughout Oregon that were set up, that we’re still getting information from.”

Glick said the goal is to initiate discussion that will produce positive results for the forest and its communities.

“Sometimes there’s disagreement in science,” she said. “So how do you work on that other than at the same table? That’s what we’re really hoping, to get everybody to bring their science and figure out what is the best management practice for the South Santiam Watershed.”

Collaboration Vital

Collaboration is a key facet of the entire plan, Maness emphasized.

“The important thing to realize is that the institute is not OSU operating on the world. It’s a partnership. That’s the way we look at it.”

“This is a really holistic, broad-scale research institute for the College of Forestry that’s designed to pull people together, not to get people to work in silos on different parts of the project, but to really pull everyone together to work on all parts of the project simultaneously,” Maness said.

“I think the word ‘holistic’ is really important to what we’re talking about here. And that’s a new approach. It’s been this or that. ‘We’ve got to get the cutout again in federal forests.’ That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to return to where it was in the 1980s. So what can we do? This is totally another approach.”

Davis and White emphasized that the focus of the institute will be feet-on-the-ground practicality that involves as many players as possible.

“What Eric and I are saying is not a bunch of platitudes,” Davis said. “In order to have a thoughtful approach, we have to work together.

What is a Healthy Ecosystem?

The institute’s third area of focus will be research into “what constitutes a healthy ecosystem.” The goal is to determine how forests contribute to everything from climate change to clean water to biodiversity protection and mitigation. Research will focus on developing forest management strategies that will “strengthen the connection between communities, people and the landscapes they inhabit” and how private and public lands can be “co-managed, or how land swaps could take place to improve overall landscape and community health.”

“The idea here is that communities are part of the landscape,” Maness said. “This is about getting people involved in more self-determination – what we manage and what we manage for.”

Much of this is about jobs.

“One of the big ideas is that we need to think about new types of forest products that we produce from Oregon,” Maness said.

“We have 2 million board feet of logs coming right through Sweet Home, heading right to China. They are too valuable to be processed here. I’m suggesting that those 2 million board feet should be processed in mills in Sweet Home, that we need a manufacturing layer that creates products that are economical to produce here instead of overseas.

“We just have to do something different because if we’re just dependent on what we have now, sawmills are so efficient they don’t hardly need any people. The Santiam (Bauman) sawmill used to be very labor-intensive. Now it’s absolutely state-of-the-art. That’s what you have to do to be competitive globally, to have a mill like that.

“I think what we really need is a deeper supply chain – more people employed for every tree we cut down.”

In March Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a new $1 million program to train architects, engineers and builders about the benefits of advanced wood building materials, and plans to invest up to $1 million in a forthcoming prize competition to design and build high-rise wood demonstration projects.

Developing New Forest Products

That’s the focus of the final research focus: competitive and innovative products. The goal is to “not only increase the value of Oregon’s natural resources, but also enhance the overall value added in products manufactured in Oregon’s communities.”

The institute will partner with the University of Oregon’s College of Architecture as well as OSU’s colleges of Engineering, Business, and Public Health and Human Sciences in developing composites and other new products that contribute to a growing market for “natural building materials” and research into how they contribute to public health.

“We’ve been talking a lot about nontraditional forest products – botanicals, for example,” Maness said, noting that there’s a “big market” for herbs and other forest products that come from the Willamette National Forest. Also, he said, silviculture – managing forestland to meet diverse needs and values “can generate forest products that can make it into the community and result in new businesses. Those are going to be value-added type of products.”

White pointed out that OSU’s Oregon Wood Innovation Center is already working to develop new biomass technology, the type of research that will be a focus of the Institute, such as converting forest-derived woody biomass into boiler fuel or higher-value products.

In addition to product development assistance and testing services for Oregon wood products companies, OSU scientists have also been involved in developing new commercial uses for the western juniper growing in southeastern Oregon and development and testing of wood and wood/non-wood composites.

‘New Ways to Use Traditional Resources’

“The college has a great history of looking at wood products and new technologies,” White said. “I think looking at new ways to use traditional resources or added resources that have value will be part of this.”

Davis noted that the college can also help people who are already working on such projects.

“There’s all kinds of things we could remove from the forests that could add value,” she said. “ But a lot goes into that. How do you remove it, haul it and process it to add that value? And what markets are there for it? That’s an area that I hope OSU can help with over the long term.”

Forums in which stakeholders can discuss the concept and operation of working forests will be a key element of the institute, Maness said.

“By ‘working forests,’ we don’t mean just forests that are being logged. We mean forests that are working. We have to have dialogue and we have to do experiments and we can’t guess. That’s what we’re doing now. We’re basically guessing and it’s litigating about guessing, not about science.

“That’s why the dialogue is good and one thing this will do, because all the stakeholders are involved in this, it will bring people together in the same room. We just want to make sure that’s done respectfully, that everybody gets a chance to talk and we don’t get into these arguments and fights.”

Institute for Working Forests

focuses on four goals :

The Institute for Working Forest Landscapes, which is being planned for the forests east of Sweet Home, has four main goals or themes.

Thomas Maness, dean of the OSU College of Forestry, said all four are necessary to the success of the enterprise.

“Forestry, for a century in this country, has really been about dealing with small areas,” he said. “Now, what we’re realizing is that the problems that we face are landscape-level issues. It’s like the big picture.”

The four goals are:

– Improve the health of rural communities and citizens.

Essentially, this goal is to improve the health of individuals living in communities associated with the forest and develop forest-related jobs with new technology and “merchantable timber,” and restoration of forest health.

“We’re looking at how to make ecosystems more resilient but, at the same time, how to make communities, particularly forest-dependent communities, healthier,” Maness said.

“And those that have had a long history of working with forestry-related activities, bring them back into doing that, and try to pull that together.

“And we know that if we’re really going to succeed with that, we have to look at forest products in a whole new way. It can’t be the same old forest commodity products only.”

He noted that a significant shift in modern architectural design is the move toward use of wood for tall buildings – 10 to 30 stories in height – that have been built of non-renewable materials such as concrete, brick and steel.

“These are beautiful buildings, healthy to live and work in,” he said. “Engineers and architects are saying this is the first real new technology in years. Architects and designers are really excited to work with this new technology.”

Such buildings are being constructed in cities such as London, Melbourne, Vancouver and Chicago, he said, but Oregon is “lagging behind” in this field.

“The really exciting thing is that the wood species that we have are really ideally suited for that,” he said. “Douglas fir is a high-valued species if it’s clear and used properly. By taking too much wood out of it, you’re not getting the advantage of Douglas fir.”

– Increase the competitiveness of Oregon’s private landowners and businesses.

“Healthy buildings and building materials, certification systems, manufacturing, renewable materials and wood engineering and design all have a role to play in expanding markets that offer great opportunities for growing Oregon’s economy.”

– Enhance ecosystem health with a “landscape” approach.

Though factors important to healthy forestlands, such as catastrophic fires, water quality, wildlife populations and at-risk species habitat, do not distinguish between public and private ownership, “management decisions for each are often quite different and with significant implications for the other,” the document states.

Thus, the institute will seek to implement “a landscape scale approach to forestland management based on partnerships and collaboration” through better understanding of “ecosystem dynamics” and “adaptive management techniques.”

A “key component” of the Institute will be figuring out ways to actively manage the landscape for “things like timber, water, recreation opportunities and wildlife habitat,” said OSU Assistant Professor Eric White.

“We’re being purposeful about what we want to do or not want to do on this landscape, he said. “There are a lot of opportunities here to better understand how we do that, both working as foresters and working and listening to communities and stakeholders and other landowners around us. I think that’s a real central focus.”

OSU Assistant Professor Emily Jane Davis said the institute is intended to improve the flow of information between public and private land managers who often, for various reasons, don’t talk enough.

“No one has time to get together and say, ‘What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What are the effects of it going to be and how can we do it better and how can we do it together?”

“It sounds simple, but that is what the thoughtful approach is. Unfortunately, it’s not able to be practiced very often.”

She said this is a deliberate effort to get away from how forest management decisions were made in the 1990s and more recently, in which decisions were driven by “a focus on a single species.”

“There needs to be consideration of all the species, as well as all the other values of the forest,” she said. “It’s a whole landscape approach.”

– Increase public trust in active management of public and private lands.

Acknowledging that public trust in forest management has “greatly diminished over the past two decades,” the institute will work to create “proactive, transparent and collaborative land management” that results in “broadly supported outcomes.”

The institute will bring together research and academics from a variety of educational and industrial fields in a “roundtable” approach and will emphasize “stakeholder input on research priorities.”

It will provide grants for research, using funds from public and private sources. It will include a research forest of “mixed ownerships” that will provide a laboratory for studies.

It also will provide a public forum for public input and academic discussion of forest issues.

The research forest is also seen as a vehicle for demonstrating to the public how a healthy forest can benefit them.

It will also provide opportunities for research for the approximately 200 students in the three graduate degrees programs offered by the OSU College of Forestry and the more than 800 undergraduate students in its six undergraduate programs.

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