Terra

By Lee Sherman

On June 24, Stan Gregory opened a window into Lookout Creek.

Lookout Creek, H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest

It was HJA Day, the annual field day which this year drew about 150 scientists, students, writers, foresters and community members to witness the exciting ecosystem research that makes H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest one of the crown jewels of the National Science Foundation’s network of long-term ecological research sites.

The OSU biologist had set up a pair of wedge-shaped portable aquariums beside the creek, their front and back glass panels spaced just a few inches apart. They looked almost like double-paned windows with water between the panes. Sun dapples dancing through the canopy made the glass glimmer.

Inside the narrow aquariums, species native to the McKenzie River drainage were moving lazily or watching warily. As visitors clustered in front of the trailside display, Gregory pointed out the fish, amphibians and aquatic insects he had netted from the crystalline waters just that morning: a small cutthroat trout and an even smaller rainbow, some of the “charismatic” species that humans value (as opposed to the humble sculpin, a critical but largely unheralded lynchpin in the food web). A salamander sat on the bottom of its temporary glass house, its gills pulsing rhythmically. There was a stone fly with its scorpion-like hindquarters. And a caddis fly in a gravel casing.

We were entranced. It was as if Gregory was taking us along on a virtual dive into the forest’s cold, fast waters to see the animals and insects he studies during actual dips in mask, snorkel and wetsuit.

About half of the fish species in the Willamette River are non-natives, says Stan Gregory, OSU professor of Fisheries and Wildlife. None of the non-natives have made it into Lookout Creek. "The Willamette National Forest is an anchor of the best habitat," he adds. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

For several decades, he has monitored trends in Oregon’s aquatic populations. Not all the news is bad, he said. Some species can evolve quickly to adapt to changing water conditions. And old-growth’s complex, multilayered structure — with its cool carpets of mosses, feathery stands of ferns, snarls of shade-loving oxalis, trembling vine-leaf maple, cathedral-like stands of Doug-fir and hemlock — holds onto the cold air that flows down the timbered slopes after the sun sets, mitigating some of the effects of planetary warming.

Still, he has seen the precipitous slump in salmon runs as spawning fish push upstream through the Columbia and Willamette rivers with their toxic loads of industrial and agricultural pollutants, wear themselves out leaping concrete dams, and swim against the warm, sediment-laden waters of degraded landscapes. “I’m old,” Gregory said at one point. “Maybe it won’t be so bad to die, seeing where things seem to be headed.” He smiled, but there wasn’t much mirth in the look. A few people laughed softly. Those of us who are older knew what he meant.

The students, though, stand at the beginning of their work on Earth. Their faces are smooth and unlined, their hearts beat with possibility. Will they see those trends turn around? Will they be part of the solution? There’s nothing to do but to go forward with hope.

The "red soils" show up as light colored patches in this photo from the B&B Fire Complex. Their shape often outlines the location where downed logs or other debris burned.

Another piece of conventional wisdom about severe forest fires appears to be falling. First, Oregon State University professor Beverly Law showed this year that such fires emit far less carbon than had been assumed, closer to 10 percent of above-ground live carbon stocks instead of 30 percent. Now, two forest scientists — Jane E. Smith and Cassie L. Hebel — have shown that life persists in severely burned soils, contrary to the assumption that such soils are sterilized by intense heat.

According to the June 2010 issue of Science Findings from the Pacific Northwest Forest Service, the two OSU graduates have found that life in so-called “red soils” does take a major hit. In soil samples from the 2003 B&B Fire Complex in the central Oregon Cascades, nutrients (carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus) were depleted by more than two-thirds, and microbial abundance was about 60 percent less than in less severely burned “black soils.” Not surprisingly, plants take longer to recover in these conditions, but recovery does occur.

Hebel, who now works for Watershed Sciences in Corvallis, also showed that severe burning may affect competition between native and invasive species. Non-native plants do not grow as well in severely burned soils as they do black soils. In contrast, native plants grow as well in both types of soil and may thus have an advantage in red soils.

You can read more about Hebel’s research, which was conducted in affiliation with OSU’s Subsurface Biosphere Initiative.

Smith, who has MS (forest ecology) and Ph.D. (botany and plant pathology) degrees from OSU, is a research botanist with the PNW Research Station and continues to study soil recovery after fire and salvage logging.

Scott Baker had no idea that when he agreed to participate in the making of The Cove, a documentary about a dolphin slaughter in Japan, that the movie would win an Academy Award. Neither did he expect to find as much evidence of traffic in endangered whales when he analyzed DNA from purchases made in Asian meat markets. Science has led the associate director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute down unexpected paths.

Surprise is a constant companion for scientists on the frontier of their fields. In A Feeling for the Organism, her stirring biography of Nobel prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Fox Keller wrote: “The miracle of life is that, despite the best grip we can get on reality, it continuously manages to surprise us. The beauty of science is that, notwithstanding all our tacit assumptions, these surprises can get through.”

Keller reflects on the resistance and hostility that McClintock endured when she developed a theory to explain the appearance of new traits in corn plants. The conventional wisdom in the 1950s was that genes — poorly understood, much like the cosmological concept of “dark energy” today — were nevertheless stable, fixed in place, immutable. McClintock’s idea that they could move from one chromosome to another during cell division was not understood or welcomed by others in her field.

How far we have come in plant genetics and biotechnology. We have complete genome sequences for rice, corn and a wild species known as Brachypodium (a model species that OSU geneticist Todd Mockler calls the fruit fly of plant genetics). Through the work of OSU scientist Jim Carrington and others, we know that plants and viruses engage in molecular fencing matches through mechanisms that silence genes.

New knowledge is emerging from biotechnology labs at OSU and other institutions at a dizzying pace, and plant breeders, farmers and educators need new tools to make use of it. The Gramene database is a promising example. One of its architects, OSU molecular biologist Pankaj Jaiswal, describes Gramene as a bridge between those who study genes and breeders whose eyes are on the plants we’ll need to avert food shortages in a changing world.

We still have a few things to learn about plants. Why does it take weeks for some species to go from seed to flower while others can take as long as 40 years? How can we benefit from disease resistance traits that plants have evolved through eons of evolution with microbes? No doubt, researchers will find plenty of surprises along the way. What an exciting time to be a scientist.