The College of Forestry George W. Peavy Forest Science Center on the Oregon State University Corvallis campus has a towering Nordmann fir Christmas tree thanks to a generous donation and the work of many hands.  Donated by Westwinds Farm in Dallas, the tree celebrates a 60-plus year collaboration between OSU Extension and local Christmas tree growers. It also honors Chal Landgren, who is retiring as the OSU Extension Christmas tree specialist. A couple of forestry students took a break from studying to help get the 30-foot tree into the building and raised. Benny the Beaver, the OSU mascot, also lent a hand getting the tree into its final position in the lobby!

The history of this tree starts in 1965 when Drew Michaels, a West Salem tree farmer, acquired seed from trees native to western Asia’s Caucasus Mountains. He found that this variety, now known as Nordmann fir, thrived in the hot, dry summer climate of the Willamette Valley. The descendant of Drew’s Nordmann plantation, along with other trees in the Westwinds Farm seed orchard, is part of an ongoing research project with Oregon State University. Together they are working to improve needle quality and retention and to enhance growth, with the goal of giving Willamette Valley farmers the tools to grow the best trees possible.

The OSU Christmas tree program is based at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Clackamas county, the heart of Christmas tree production in Oregon. ​​​​​​

At the College of Forestry, we are known for our collaborative research approach to advance knowledge and bring solutions to issues facing our forest landscapes and ecosystems. We take pride in creating new and innovative approaches to help partners enhance people’s lives while improving the health of our lands, businesses and vital ecosystems. This amazing work is carried out by our world-class faculty, staff and students and happens in labs and out there – on public and private lands across the state and in the College’s own 15,000 acres of College Research Forests.

In FY 2021, the College of Forestry received over $9.58 million in external awards. The awards support College of Forestry research that advances scientific knowledge critical to the health of forests, people and communities.

Here are some examples of the new awards (a complete list can be found here):

LTER: Long-Term Ecological Research at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (LTER8)
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Principal Investigator: Michael P. Nelson
$1,053,700

Continued collaboration on developing leadership in the design, manufacture and construction of buildings using innovative wood products
Sponsor: USDA – Ag Research Service
Principal Investigator: Kathleen L. Kavanagh
$803,400

Advancing Rural Prosperity and Equity Through the New Forest Economy
Sponsor: USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Principal Investigator: Emily Jane Davis; Co-PIs: Mindy Crandall, Reem Hajjar, Heidi Huber-Stearns, Gerardo Sandoval, Marko Bay, Don Albrecht
$166,571

Field trial of photosynthesis-modified transgenic poplars at Oregon State University
Sponsor: Living Carbon PBC
Principal Investigator: Steve Strauss; Co-PIs: Chris Still
$349,054

For her dissertation, Rebecca Sheridan, who recently received her Ph.D. in sustainable forest management, studied Douglas-fir seedlings. Her research on this famous tree is specific and based on the latest technology available in the Western world, but the Oregon native says one of the essential parts of her graduate school experience takes place 6,500 miles away in Armenia.

“When I started graduate school, I wanted to do research that could be applied and helpful in solving restoration and reforestation issues,” she says. “The work I’ve done in Armenia is a reminder of the tangible outcomes research can have. It helps me stay grounded.”

Sheridan’s major professor was Interim Dean Anthony S. Davis, who has collaborated with the International Programs office of the U.S. Forest Service and other organizations to complete seedling-related projects. In 2016, Sheridan joined him for the first time in Armenia.

During Sheridan’s first visit, the U.S. team worked with a nonprofit organization to build a greenhouse and start the first growing season for seedlings with the goal of restoring the depleted landscape.

Sheridan says understanding Armenian culture, the history of the country and the greater region is important when it comes to the forestry and natural resources industries. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an oil and gas blockade, so tree harvests increased to supply heat to homes.

“Deforestation rapidly increased during that time,” Sheridan explains. “I’m not sure what the landscape looked like before the blockade, but these days, it looks like Eastern Oregon with rolling hills and lots of juniper trees. It’s higher and dryer there, and the goal of this project is to reintroduce native species to the land.”

Sheridan says many of those species are wild versions of edible plants like pear, apple and almond.

“It’s cool to work with species that are familiar to us as food, but are native, wild plants in another region of the world,” she says.

Culturally, Sheridan says Armenia is an exciting fusion of West and East with diverse food and kind people.

During her three trips to the country, Sheridan relied heavily on local knowledge while gathering materials and planning her workshops. The first growing season in 2016 yielded about 200 plants, while during the
2018 season, production increased to about 5,000 seedlings. Now, Sheridan says, the greenhouse is at capacity.

“The biggest challenge is working in such a rural, agricultural community,” she says. “People there have experience with food crops and orchards. We do our best to be respectful of the knowledge of our in-country partners while also highlighting how and why we’re training them to grow container seedlings for restoration in a different way than they might be used to.”

Sheridan says they will plant the seedlings in challenging environmental conditions, without irrigation or long-term maintenance of competing vegetation, so they need to be ready for the conditions they will face. Wildfire is also becoming prevalent in the area, adding a new twist to the project, as Sheridan and her in-country partners consider whether the landscape is fire adaptive.

Sheridan says the international work experience inspired her, and even though she’s not sure what her future holds, she hopes to continue visiting Armenia.

“It doesn’t matter if I understand every detail about how plants grow,” she says. “But, if I don’t understand how fertilizer gets shipped into different parts of the world or the cultural norms that influence what time of day you
can get people to water at our greenhouse, I’ll be less effective in helping solve these problems.”

A version of this story appeared in the fall 2019 issue of Focus on Forestry, the alumni magazine of the Oregon State University College of Forestry. Learn more about international programs within the College of Forestry here.

What is your job?

I’m an assistant professor here in the Wood Science + Engineering Department. I’ll also be taking over the Utility Pole Research Cooperative and the Environmental Performance of Treated Wood Research Cooperative. I’ve just been here for about two months so far.

How did you end up here at Oregon State?

I got my Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, and my advisor actually did a job really similar to this one. I studied biofules and fungal biology. After that, I did a postdoc at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is a Department of Energy Laboratory that mostly focuses on nuclear energy, but there were a few biofules people like me there.

Are you a morning person or night person?

Morning. I’m also horribly addicted to coffee. In my office, I have an espresso maker, French press and drip brew to help keep me awake.

What does life look like outside work?

I have my wife and my 11-month-old daughter at home. We haven’t done too much yet other than explore the area since we’re still new around here.

Have you watched anything good on Netflix lately?

Every Friday night we’re watching the new episode of the Great British Baking Show. We really enjoy that. My wife is from Ireland, and we enjoy British humor.

Do you like to bake?

I do bake bread sometimes, but you really have to be sure you eat it before it goes bad, so I go in and out of those phases. I’m not baking right now because I felt like I was throwing away too much bread. I also enjoy cooking.

Conventional timber harvesting has no effect on carbon levels in the mineral soils of the western Pacific Northwest for at least 3 1/2 years after harvest, according to recently-published research by Oregon State University and Weyerhaeuser Company.

The study is important because soils contain a large percentage of the total carbon in forests – generally about half of it – and understanding soil carbon response to clear-cuts and other forest management practices is vital in determining carbon balance in any given stand as well as the overall landscape.

Stable carbon levels in the ground means less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide’s concentration in the atmosphere has risen 30 percent since the start of the Industrial Age.

Historic in its scope, this collaborative and long-term effort between Jeff Hatten of the OSU College of Forestry and Scott Holub of Weyerhaeuser monitored nine managed Douglas-fir forest stands in Oregon and Washington, before and after conventional timber harvest and replanting, and involved more than 50,000 soil samples from 2700 sample points, thus far.  Continued monitoring of soil carbon with additional rounds of sampling is planned at these sites for decades to come.

“Our original hypothesis that timber harvesting would decrease soil carbon in the short term was disproven,” said Hatten, a soils researcher in the college’s Department of Forest Engineering, Resources and Management. “And I think it’s fair to say this has been the most extensive sampling ever conducted to determine if harvesting has an impact on soil carbon.”

“The no-result was remarkable,” he said. “Even where you have the highest soil temperatures and the highest soil moistures – the strongest environment for decomposition that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – harvesting doesn’t seem to have an impact in the areas we studied. And the results likely extend to similar areas, probably totaling many millions of hectares in the Northwest.”

Across all the sites combined, after harvest, the scientists found negligible change (+2%) in mineral soil carbon content and a 184 percent hike in forest floor carbon, the result of harvest residue.

Modern harvest methods are designed to cause minimal soil disturbance, and the stable soil carbon would seem to reflect that, the researchers said.

“Concern about rising atmospheric carbon dioxideconcentrations has heightened interest in the role that forests play in carbon sequestration, storage and cycling,” Hatten said. “Living trees sequester and store carbon, but less recognition has been given to soils’ role. We have plans to resample these sites in coming years and decades to look at the longer-term impacts.”

Citation:

Holub, S.M. and Hatten, J.A. 2019. Soil Carbon Storage in Douglas-Fir Forests of Western Oregon and Washington Before and After Modern Timber Harvesting Practices. Soil Science Society of America Journal 83(1):S175-S186.

Abstract available here: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts/83/s1/S175

Carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is causing the Earth to warm, oceans to acidify and climates to change. Because tree growth captures atmospheric carbon, some scientists and environmental advocacy groups promote massive tree planting as a solution to climate change.

A group of 46 scientists from around the world, led by Joseph Veldman of Texas A&M University, are urging caution regarding plans to address climate change through massive tree planting.

These scientists teamed up with Veldman, whose research focuses on the fire ecology of savannas and forests of Texas and Tropical America, to publish a message of concern in the journal Science.

 “While tree planting can be good in some deforested areas, tree planting in Earth’s natural grasslands destroys plant and animal habitat and will not sequester enough carbon to compensate for fossil fuel emissions,” Veldman says. “Few people realize that planting trees in the wrong places can actually damage ecosystems, increase wildfire intensity and exacerbate global warming.”

The new publication is a critique of another recent paper in Science, which claimed global, large-scale tree planting could capture 205 gigatons of carbon, or one-third of the carbon dioxide emitted since the industrial revolution.

 “Because the estimate of 205 gigatons of carbon was so large, in July 2019, headlines around the world declared tree planting to be the best solution to climate change,” Veldman said. We now know those headlines were wrong.”

In their critique, Veldman and his collaborators write that serious methodological flaws led to a five-fold overestimate of the potential for new trees to mitigate climate change. Among the problems, they point out that the original study assumed that soils in ecosystems without trees contain no carbon, when in fact many ecosystems such as savannas and peatlands, contain more carbon in soils than in the above-ground vegetation.

The study also neglected the fact that coniferous forests in boreal and high mountain regions absorb more sunlight and emit more heat than treeless areas, and actually exacerbate rather than mitigate global warming.

Finally, Veldman and his collaborators argue tree planting in grasslands and savannas, as proposed by the original article’s research team, is damaging to the environment.

“Ancient grasslands and savannas contain immense biodiversity and provide services to humanity, such as livestock forage and groundwater recharge,” Veldman says. “We worry that a myopic focus on tree planting will reduce the capacity of people to adapt to climate change while distracting from efforts to conserve intact ecosystems and reduce fossil fuel consumption.”

Co-author Christopher Still of the Oregon State University College of Forestry, adds,  “Careful and targeted afforestation and reforestation can help with the climate crisis, but only if done in certain regions and with appropriate safeguards for biodiversity, water availability, and in concert with local communities. ”

While earning his master’s degree at Oregon State, Preston Green conducted research on cable-assisted harvesting, a safer way to harvest timber, on the McDonald Forest. The McDonald Forest is owned and operated by the College of Forestry. Just minutes from Corvallis, the forest is often utilized as space for graduate, undergraduate and faculty research. It’s also a living classroom for students conducting labs and a recreation resource for the public.

Preston says, “The College Forests, to me, are a place that epitomizes the potential a forest can have. A forest can provide for so many different uses and when the right management and stakeholders are brought together, everybody can truly win. My research was a great example and why I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work on the College Forest – not only for the generation of wood products that help support the College of Forestry and the local community but also for the forest health and scientific knowledge that has reached audiences worldwide.”

You just started at Oregon State/the TallWood Design Institute. What do you?

I’m the technical manager. Right now, I’m working on getting our space in the A.A. ‘Red’ Emmerson Advanced Wood Product Laboratory set up and functional. Eventually, I’ll manage and run the projects and tests that go on here in our space.

What’s your background? How did you end up at Oregon State?

I grew up in a small village in Germany where I did an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker. During university in Berlin, I did a co-op program at the University of British Columbia and ended up moving there permanently. When the opportunity at TDI came up I didn’t hesitate.   

How is it going? Are you getting settled in?

I’m used to big moves. The move from Germany to Canada was a big adjustment that took a long time. From Canada to the U.S., there are definitely still some cultural differences that I’m getting used to.

What are you most looking forward to in your new role?

I’m excited for challenges. I’ve already faced some in terms of getting our lab set up and running. Having that finished is something I’m looking forward to as well as the combination of hands-on work, programming and seeing final products. That’s a huge reward. I could never do a full-time desk job. That would drive me crazy.

What excites you about the work you do with mass timber?

I’m excited for the mass timber revolution that is happening right now. It’s amazing to see more architects embrace it in North America and watch how people build with it. I’m also really interested in lifecycle assessment of mass timber buildings.

What do you do when you’re not working?

I used to travel a lot for work, so when I’m not working, I like to stay closer to home. I like alpine touring in the winter and mountain biking in the summer, let me know if you want to ride bikes. I rode my bicycle from Vancouver to San Francisco on the 101 once. The Pacific Northwest is a beautiful place to have outdoor adventures. I’d like to get involved with the trail building community here in Corvallis, I used to build a lot on the North Shore in Vancouver. 

What’s your favorite place you’ve traveled?

New Zealand. I did a two-month bike trip there once, all over the islands.

What are you watching or listening to right now?

Well, I just cancelled my Netflix subscription. But I did watch The Boys on Amazon, and really enjoyed that. I also saw one of my favorite bands, The National, over Labor Day weekend.

Your colleagues have noticed you carry green tea around with you. Is that your favorite drink?

I switch to green tea after my one cup of coffee in the morning. I’m obsessed with coffee gadgets and have five different styles of coffee makers. When I moved here, I brought a five-pound bag of beans with me from my old neighborhood in Vancouver, so I haven’t learned about the good, local coffee here in Oregon yet.

The College of Forestry’s world-class students and faculty conduct ground-breaking research within the subjects of forestry, natural resources, tourism and wood science and engineering. Our research happens in labs and outdoors– on public and private lands across the state and in the College’s own 15,000 acres of College Research Forests as well as around the nation and the world.

The College of Forestry received $8.5 million in new and continuing awards.

Industry and agency partnerships thrived via the college’s 10 research cooperatives, with more than 100 private industry and government agency members providing an additional $1.5 million to support collaborative research.

Here are some examples of funded research projects from a portfolio of over 40 new projects:

Resistance or Resilience in Soil Carbon Pools?: Exploring Soil Carbon Dynamics Using a Ubiquitous Forest Organic Matter Removal Experiment
Sponsor: USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Principal Investigator Jeffrey Hatten
$485,800

Collaborative Research: MSB-ENSA: Leveraging NEON to Build a Predictive Cross-scale Theory of Ecosystem Transpiration
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Co-Principal Investigator Christopher Still
$473,045

Demonstrating Use and Performance of a CLT Modular Building Utilizing Low-Value Ponderosa Pine Lumber from Logs Harvested in Pacific NW Forest Restoration Programs
Sponsor: USDA Forest Service
Principal Investigator Mariapaola Riggio
$249,999

Fire Performance of Custom CLT Layups Utilizing Ponderosa Pine from Logs Harvested in Western Forest Restoration Programs
Sponsor: USDA Forest Service
Principal Investigator Rakesh Gupta
$249,998

Multi-Scale Assessment of Wildfire Impacts to Human and Ecological Values to Support Forest Service Fire Management Policy
Sponsor: USDA Forest Service
Principal Investigator Meg Krawchuk
$294,000

Scaling Juniper Markets:  Sustainable Solutions for Healthy Rangelands and Rural Opportunity
Sponsor: Sustainable Northwest/Oregon Innovation Council
Principal Investigator Scott Leavengood
$244,741