It’s not easy to find a marbled murrelet’s nest in Oregon. It wasn’t until 1990 that researchers even located the first one in the state. The elusive breeding behavior of this threatened species has made it challenging to protect through conservation efforts and strategic management of coastal forests. It’s clear the population of this small seabird has declined from historic levels — but the reasons why are murky.

That’s why a team of College of Forestry researchers launched Oregon’s first large-scale, long-term study of murrelet breeding biology. This collaborative project, initiated in 2016, drew immediate support from a diverse group of stakeholders across the state.

“Murrelets are a listed species, so there’s a lot of interest in recovering this population,” said Jim Rivers, an assistant professor of wildlife ecology who’s leading the research effort. “But we haven’t had the information we need to understand what’s constraining reproductive output.”

For phase one of the project, the research team turned to existing data to better understand why the birds travel inland to nest some years, but not others. Murrelets rely on the sea for their food, including forage fish like anchovy, herring, and smelt, and commute as much as 50 miles inland to nest in old-growth and late-successional forests, where they lay a single egg. The researchers learned when it’s a bad sea year and ocean temperatures are too high, the birds forego breeding, unable to get food to feed their young.

For the next phase of research, the team studied the murrelet’s breeding behavior, tracking them from sea to nest. Venturing out on a research vessel, the team boarded inflatable boats to catch murrelets, install radio tags and release the birds back into the wild. When breeding season hit, the team patrolled the coast with airplanes, listening for beeps from radio tags to narrow down potential nesting sites for the
ground crew and tree climber to locate.

But because murrelets nest in older forests, just getting to the vicinity of a nesting tree usually involves scaling piles of blowdown and bushwhacking through thick growth for miles. And murrelets are sneaky nest-builders — and sitters. They don’t use twigs and branches to build their nests like other birds. Instead, they find a mossy branch where they lay a single egg and take turns incubating it. They trade spots once every 24 hours, sitting so still that their only movement may be just the blink of an eye.

And when they’re moving in and out of the nest, they’re really moving. Murrelets have been clocked at nearly 100 mph and their typical cruising speed is 60-70 mph. They usually fly at dawn and dusk, so it takes an eagle eye to spot these birds and find their nests, a large reason there were only 29 active nests recorded in Oregon before this project. The team of OSU researchers more than doubled that number, also installing cameras at each nest to monitor success.

“We’re learning a lot about where murrelets are nesting, how successful they are and what causes them to fail,” said Rivers. “This information has been a long time coming, and it ties back to how challenging it is to do this fieldwork.”

A version of this story appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Focus on Forestry, the alumni magazine of the Oregon State University College of Forestry.

Balancing timber production to maximize biodiversity

As the human population grows, the demand for resources is increasing. But at what cost to biodiversity? Just as the agricultural industry contends with how to sustainably feed eight billion humans, the challenge for forest managers is to find sustainable ways to meet human wood consumption needs, explains Matt Betts, Ruth H. Spaniol chair of renewable resources and professor in the department of forest ecosystems and society.

“What we consume has a huge impact on our planet’s biodiversity,” said Betts. “But very few researchers have tested approaches to minimize tradeoffs between timber production and biodiversity conservation.”
Betts explains that in agriculture, there are two main camps of thinking. The first, “land sparing” involves setting aside large portions of the landscape as unmanaged reserves, and growing crops intensively in others. The second, “land sharing” involves low-intensity “nature-friendly” agriculture. This results in lower yield, increased total area for food production and therefore few or no reserves.

In forestry, this “land sharing versus sparing” model has been expanded to a triad approach, where a given landscape may be divided into differing proportions of three distinct management groups — reserves, focused on biodiversity conservation; intensive management, focused on wood production; and ecological forestry, which is a mix of both.

To test this approach, he is collaborating with stakeholders inside and outside the College of Forestry to launch a 20-year study across 40 different sub-watersheds in the Elliott State Research Forest. The research is designed to test different proportions of all three management types across various forest landscapes (watersheds). By doing this, Betts and his team hope to learn how these management approaches affect biodiversity and wood production over time.

Before the project can begin, it must gain the approval of many stakeholder groups to be completed on the state-owned forest. In the meantime, Betts is working on a shorter-term version of this project funded by the National Institute for Food and Agriculture.

In collaboration with several CoF researchers, including Klaus Puettmann, Doug Mainwaring and John Sessions along with Taal Levi, a professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences, and doctoral student Maggie Hallerud, Betts’ team is collecting data from forests that fall under the categories of reserve, intensive management and ecological forestry. They are performing preliminary modeling about how each approach affects biodiversity. Hallerud is leading the biodiversity data collection and analysis and Levi is leading the eDNA analysis in this work.

Before and after each experiment, the team counts various species, measures vegetation and incorporates cutting-edge research methods. Researchers are identifying recorded bird sounds through machine learning, tracking wildlife with game cameras powered by artificial intelligence and using DNA barcoding (eDNA) to monitor species diversity.

This study comes with limitations, however, and Betts thinks the most meaningful insights will come from a longer-term project with more controlled experiments at landscape scales.

“That’s the real gold standard for science,” he says. “What we find in short-term studies is often overturned by what we find in long-term studies. And with how long-lived trees are, there’s certain information we could never get during a single career.”

Betts believes a long-term research project in the Elliott State Research Forest could offer critical insights into how to conserve biodiversity and sequester carbon while sustainably keeping up with society’s increasing demand for wood products.

“We don’t have enough information about this mix of forestry practices in the Pacific Northwest,” he said. “A long-term project like the one proposed for the Elliott would enable us to try to reduce the potential trade-offs between timber production and conservation — and identify an ideal mix of forestry management practices that enable production of wood while still maintaining biodiversity. If successful, this could be a fantastic example of approaches to balance human needs with biodiversity conservation, and how people can collaborate to move beyond historical conflicts about forest values.”

A version of this story appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Focus on Forestry, the alumni magazine of the Oregon State University College of Forestry.

The sugar maple has a reputation as a powerhouse for maple syrup production — but it’s not the only maple game around. An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by the College of Forestry is at the forefront of a movement to tap into Oregon’s bigleaf maple. The goal? Put the Pacific Northwest on the maple syrup map.

“This is a great economic opportunity for Oregonians to build an industry centered around the bigleaf maple, particularly in western Oregon, where the tree is especially abundant,” says Eric Jones, the principal investigator for the project and assistant professor of practice at the College of Forestry.

So why hasn’t a bigleaf maple tapping industry taken off before in the Pacific Northwest? Economics. The bigleaf maple, acer macophyllum, has less sugar in its sap — usually about one-third to one-half — than the sugar maple. So instead of needing around 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, as is the case with sugar maple, you need 80-90 gallons of bigleaf maple sap. But technology advancements like food-grade vacuum tubing that extract higher volumes of sap from trees and commercial reverse osmosis machines which remove 75 percent of water from the sap, have resulted in a cost-effective way to turn less sugary sap into syrup.

“This technology is a gamechanger for the bigleaf maple,” says Jones. To help establish a sustainable bigleaf maple industry in Oregon, Jones assembled a diverse research team including scholars and students from anthropology, food science, extension, geography, environmental arts and humanities, economics, ethnobiology and engineering. The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the team $1 million in funding through a pair of multi-year awards to promote the emerging industry, provide training and educate landowners interested in developing commercial enterprises.

“I think there’s a romance and infectious nature to tapping bigleaf maples and we’re trying to help landowners find the easiest and most economic and ecologically prudent path to get into ‘sugaring,’ as they refer to it in the maple industry,” says Jones.

Besides producing maple syrup with a complex flavor profile, the bigleaf maple is the source of other products like nutritional maple water, edible flowers, honey, lumber, figured wood and firewood.

The research team is working to mitigate the risks involved with managing and sugaring bigleaf maples, including incorporating food safety standards into commercial production and investigating how wildlife, diseases and different climatic conditions affect bigleaf maple stands.

With climate change ushering in greater uncertainty about the future of Pacific Northwest forests, the team is interested in how the trees will fare under changing conditions. While hotter and drier weather in some areas will negatively impact bigleaf maple populations, the trees may prove resilient in certain microclimates. Jones is currently an advisor on a pilot project in Washington, where the group is planting thousands of bigleaf maple trees on old dairy land as part of a carbon offset program.

“The bigleaf maple is a tenacious tree, as any forester will attest to, and perhaps it has a role in helping mitigate climate change,” says Jones.

Jones hopes that a growing maple industry will invite people to develop a deeper appreciation for the land and find new ways to engage with each other and with Oregon’s biodiverse and ecologically complex environment.

“Our team of researchers is working hard to make the emerging bigleaf maple industry an inclusive and equitable economic opportunity,” Jones says. “We hope to ignite a bigleaf maple culture in the Pacific Northwest like the sugar maple culture in the Northeast.”

In May 2023, the team will hold the first bigleaf maple festival in Salem, Oregon. Learn more at www.oregontreetappers.net.

THE RESEARCH TEAM
Eric Jones – CoF principal investigator
Melanie Douville + John Scheb – CoF graduate students
Barb Lachenbruch – CoF professor emeritus (tree physiology)
Ron Reuter – CoF associate professor (soil science)
Badege Bishaw – CoF courtesy faculty (agroforestry)
Tiffany Fegel – Forestry and Natural Resources, Extension coordinator
Lisa Price – OSU professor (ethnobiology)
Joy Waite-Cusic – OSU associate professor (food safety)
Ann Colonna – OSU senior faculty research assistant, (sensory testing)
Rebecca McLain – Portland State University (ethnography)

A version of this story appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Focus on Forestry, the alumni magazine of the Oregon State University College of

Creative solutions target the housing and climate crises

What if we could accelerate the use of mass timber, restore forests, create jobs and address the housing crisis in Oregon?

The Oregon Mass Timber Coalition thinks it’s possible. In September 2022, the OMTC was awarded over $41 million by the U.S. Economic Development Build Back Better Regional Challenge, to strengthen Oregon’s national leadership in mass timber, adding new capacity to produce mass timber modular housing.

“The housing crisis in Oregon is severe, with our state ranking 49 out of 50 for housing supply relative to its population,” says Iain Macdonald, director of the TallWood Design Institute at the College of Forestry. “A thriving mass timber industry could help provide affordable housing, while also decreasing the carbon footprint of built environments, improving the resilience of forests and creating living-wage jobs.”

Oregon State University is a key leader in the OMTC, which includes Business Oregon, the Oregon Department of Forestry, and the University of Oregon.

The two universities are spearheading the research for the coalition, including the development of two new facilities: the Oregon Acoustic Research Lab at the University of Oregon, and the Oregon Fire Testing Facility at OSU.

Stewart Professor of Forest Operations Woodam Chung is leading an important pillar of the project. He aims to leverage “smart technology” to modernize the field of forestry.

Chung explains that forestry in the region — and its workforce — has suffered from a lack of innovation, jeopardizing the sector’s sustainability and global competitiveness.

Forestry is also one of the most dangerous job sectors in the country — and has a diminishing and aging workforce.

But, Chung says, “smart forestry” can help shift these trends by modernizing forest practices through innovative technologies that make forestry more efficient and safer — from harvest to mill.

One pilot project Chung will pursue through the grant is the use of smart cameras on harvesting machines. The cameras use data-driven algorithms to detect which trees to harvest in real-time, based on their species, size, straightness and knot sizes. This kind of technology will enable foresters to utilize small-diameter trees for mass timber and maximize the value recovery of forest resources.

“We can apply this system to forest restoration practices, so we can efficiently separate trees that could be utilized for mass timber at harvest. This can improve the efficiency of wood handling and supply,” he says.

He explains that this will also increase fire resilience, as it will help thin dense forests so there is less wildfire fuel left behind. This is important economically, too. Forest restoration is costly, and if the removed fiber can be gainfully used in a commercial mass timber product, the U.S. Forest Service will be able to treat more acres each year.

Chung is also working on landscape mapping, wearable devices to improve health
and safety for workers, and smart sensors.

“This kind of technology is a win for forest health, fire resilience, economic development and the environment,” says Chung.

“We’re looking at all of these interconnected issues holistically and weaving together research projects that can enhance and expand the mass timber industry,” says Macdonald. “It’s an incredible opportunity to drive real change that will result in meaningful improvements to livelihoods and our environment.”

A version of this story appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Focus on Forestry, the alumni magazine of the Oregon State University College of Forestry.