From the first growth spurts of the tiniest seedling to the final days of the mightiest giant, ants are there, shaping the lives of trees.

By Aaron M. Ellison

When thinking of how ants interact with trees, a lot of people may think of carpenter ants eating trees — and the wood in their home. In fact, in both our forests and houses, these denizens of hollow trees and rotting rafters are merely the final stage of a lifelong relationship between trees and many kinds of ants. Take a closer look at the many healthy seedlings, saplings and trees near your home. Anywhere you look, you will probably find a worker of one of the many ant species associated with the trees in our forests. Follow her back to her nest, and you’ll start to learn about the intertwined lives of ants and trees.

OF SEEDLINGS AND SOIL

The trail of workers often will lead back to a volcano-like heap of soil. Depending on the species, such anthills can range in size from a tiny pile of sand grains that is less than an inch across to a huge mound several feet high and many cubic yards in volume. This is where the lifelong connection between ants and trees begins. Anthills are the product of tens to tens of thousands of burrowing, tunneling worker ants that have excavated mineral soil while building temperature-controlled earthen chambers in which to live, store food, protect the queen and rear her brood. In the formerly glaciated parts of North America — most of Canada and much of the northern reaches of the United States — there are no native earthworms. In these areas, much of the topsoil was created by ants. In fact, ants create soil up to 10 times faster than earthworms, excavating as much as 30,000 pounds of soil per acre every year, creating about 4 inches of new soil per millennium in the process.

In this way, ants are integral to the life of a tree from the very beginning. Ants create the best compost there is; anthills are localized hotspots of nutrients. Their digestive cycle helps to create the nutrient-rich soil young trees need. As omnivores, ants collect and store large amounts of nutrient-rich prey. As they process this food, their wastes further enrich the soil. Ant nests are also close to pH-neutral: If the surrounding soil is acidic, ant nests tend to be more basic, and vice-versa. All of this means that a seedling that germinates from a seed that was lucky enough to land on the sweet, rich soil of an anthill will often get a head-start in the race for the canopy.

SCRATCH MY BACK, I’LL SCRATCH YOURS

As trees grow, they are set upon by true bugs (order Hemiptera) that feed on sap, such as aphids, among many other herbivorous insects. In some cases, the role ants play at this stage in a tree’s life can actually cause a population boom for these insects, as many of our most common and abundant ants, including Fuzzy ants (Lasius species) and species of Formica (Latin for “ant,” not the plastic countertop) care for the bugs. They stand guard over the bugs, protecting them from predators and occasionally moving them from place to place to tap new areas of the tree, all in exchange for the privilege of dining on their excreta. Only rarely will a mature tree succumb to this population boom, but seedlings or small saplings may not survive it.

In response, some trees have evolved a work-around to the ant-bug mutualism, and feed the ants directly. In turn, for a reward similarly sweet to that which they would get from the bugs, the ants protect the trees.

This type of ant-tree mutualism is common throughout the tropics, where a variety of trees produce specialized structures to feed and/or house ants. One of the classic examples of a co-evolutionary mutualism — two species evolving in tandem to the benefit of both — involves ‘ant-plants’ and ‘plant-ants’ in tropical forests. Ant-plants, such as Central America’s bull-horn acacias and trees of the genus Cecropia, have hollow structures — thorns and internodes in their hollow stems, respectively — in which ants form their colonies. The trees also secrete sugar and protein-rich food bodies that make up a significant portion of the ants’ diet. In return, the plant-ants actively patrol the surface of the tree, aggressively fighting off herbivores such as caterpillars, as well as pruning off vines that could otherwise engulf the tree.

These tightly-coupled mutualisms between ants and trees are still unknown in the temperate zone, though they do exist between ants and many common forest understory herbs, such as trillium and bloodroot, which provide similar food rewards for dispersing their seeds. Nonetheless, trees in temperate zones derive nutrients from the waste products — decaying food and nutrient-rich feces and excretions — of the many species of ants that nest and forage under bark and in the canopy. This kind of indirect mutualism — trees provide ants with shelter; ants feed on herbivorous insects; ant wastes nourish the tree — is widespread in most forests.

Trees also can benefit from the voracious appetites of ground-dwelling predatory ants — another indirect mutualism between trees and ants. For example, in the eastern U.S., Formica neogagates opportunistically feeds on a wide range of caterpillars, including gypsy moths and eastern tent caterpillars. Other Formica species of ants prey on sawflies that mine birch leaves. Mound-building red wood ants (Formica rufa-group species) prey on a wide range of insects. In the western U.S., one of these mound-builders, Formica obscuripes, preys not only on caterpillars, but also on conifer sawfly larvae. In general, when predatory ants are abundant, trees set more seeds, even if those ants also tend aphids and other bugs.

THE TREE RETURNS TO THE SOIL

Bark protects a tree from the elements, but over time, fissures open, cracks appear, beetles burrow, water seeps in and fungus follows. As the tree’s life comes to an end, ants are there, as they have been since the beginning. As the aging tree’s heartwood softens and rots, carpenter ants move in, removing the rotten wood and opening up space in which to nest. Their huge colonies, some with more than 15,000 workers, can live for decades; carpenter ants overwinter by huddling together for warmth, feeding on fats stored in their bodies and — when it gets really cold — filling themselves with glycerol, a chemical like antifreeze that stops ice crystals from forming inside their bodies.

Like many other ants, carpenter ants are omnivorous. They range widely, foraging for food, primarily at night, hundreds of yards from their nest. When the colony gets too big for their original tree house, they form satellite colonies in other rotting trees — and sometimes houses — nearby. The satellite colonies remain connected to the natal nest where the queen remains; workers move food and larvae to and from the satellites.

Carpenter ants signal their presence as the sawdust they remove from inside the tree builds up at its base. When the dying tree finally falls, the decaying bole, with the help of soil nesting ants, returns its nutrients to the soil, bringing the cycle back to the beginning. Many logs also nurse a new cohort of seedlings, which will in turn support a new generation of ants and their allies.

So before putting ant baits around the woodpile, remember that these little creatures, which in aggregate far outweigh all of Earth’s vertebrates — including people — really do keep the world turning.

Aaron M. Ellison is the senior research fellow in Ecology at Harvard University’s Harvard Forest, and lead author of A Field Guide to the Ants of New England (Yale University Press, 2012). Learn more about ants and contribute your own observations and insights at www.NEants.net.

The post Ants and Trees: A Lifelong Relationship appeared first on American Forests.

Planting one tree a day on degraded land for almost 40 years, William Stanley Merwin, former Poet laureate of the United States, has seen his patience pay off. Little by little, tree by tree, he has created a lush grove of thousands of palms on the Maui hillside that he calls home.

Despite Maui’s 12-month growing season and abundant vegetation, the agricultural developments of the last century have left some portions of Hawaii’s second largest island in poor condition. The land Merwin would plant his palms on had originally been native forest, but — like vast swaths in Maui’s valley and highlands — had been razed to become profitable sugarcane fields and pineapple plantations. The latter reached its production zenith in the early 1960s and then commenced a steep decline. By the time nutrient-depleted pineapple parcels in Haiku on Maui’s northern coast were put up for sale as small 2- to 3-acre lots, they were listed on the Soil Survey Maps of 1963 as “wasteland.”

When Merwin purchased his initial lot in 1977, he planted a tree, though this first tree was not a palm. Intending to return the land to native species, Merwin discovered these species no longer survived in the poor soil. Some of his first plantings included evergreen trees of the genus Casuarinas. Given the invasive nature of some of the earliest species of Casuarinas planted on the islands, the genus had earned a mixed reputation in Hawaii and Merwin deliberately avoided these. “I was careful to plant species that had no such intrusive habits,” he recalls in his 2010 essay, “The House and Garden: The Emergence of a Dream.” With their ability to put nitrogen back in the soil and shed their numerous needles to form a moisture trapping, weedsmothering mantle, the Casuarinas made a noticeable difference in the health of the landscape within a few years. When Merwin tried planting native trees again, most still did not fare well, but thanks to the improved soil, the Hawaiian palms did. They settled in and grew, inspiring Merwin to plant more palms — both native and exotic varieties — as his revised route of re-vegetation.

“Only a forest knows how to make a forest,” Merwin says, but that hasn’t stopped him from lending a hand, devoting some portion of his day — and now life — to germinating palm seeds, nurturing the seedlings, identifying a spot, spading a hole and planting a palm, eventually establishing a living library of over 850 of the world’s palm species. As a result of this diligent, incremental reforestation, now, when this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet enters his driveway, he comes home to a jungle.

The diversity of palm species on the densely planted 19-acre property is astonishing. Along the property’s shaded, sinewy paths, exquisite palms varieties flaunt a potpourri of leaves and fronds. One has broad leaves that feel synthetic like nylon; another has crinkled leaves like a venetian blind; another arrays its fronds in a fishtail formation. There are palms with suede-like fuzz, palms with coarse hair and palms with zebra stripes on their trunks. Among the rarest of Merwin’s 850 species is the Hyophorbe indica, a nearly extinct palm from Reunion Island, off the coast of Madagascar. From seeds sent by a friend, Merwin was able to germinate and plant a seedling, which now stands 15 feet high and is festooned with viable seeds of its own.

Today, Merwin outsources much of his germination to Floribunda Palms and Exotics, a commercial grower on The Big Island of Hawaii that sells 300 species of rare palms from around the world. Every three weeks or so, FedEx will pull into the jungle driveway bearing a box with seedlings nestled inside. These plants are tucked into pots and placed in the small, spare greenhouse at the heart of the property to await transplanting.

Meanwhile, the property’s arborist, Olin Erickson, attends the regular maintenance, stewarding this miraculous tropical forest landscape, which is anything but static. Using only organic methods, he removes the prolific, cumbersome debris of sloughed fronds from the paths; he weeds amid the trees; he digs holes wherever Merwin puts in a pink flag; and he is currently preparing the last remaining portion of the property that is still wasteland — a sun-baked, weedy hill — for its eventual transformation. “I’m an ant,” Erickson declares, speaking both of his size relative to the palms soaring above him, and also of his seemingly humble, but actually vital participation in facilitating a balance among the densely planted trees and shrubs, vines and grasses, which are all constantly vying for more space and light. Erickson notes how the forest’s present canopy is two-tiered, but will eventually develop third, fourth, even fifth tier levels of vegetation.

In 2010, in an effort to conserve and perpetuate this botanical treasure, Merwin and his wife, Paula, partnered with his publisher, Copper Canyon Press and the Hawaii Coastal Land Trust to establish the Merwin Conservancy. The Conservancy seeks to preserve Merwin’s legacy for the future study and retreat of botanists and writers, regarding all that he’s accomplished over the past 40 years as “just a beginning.”

The morning after W.S. Merwin’s 85th birthday, a visitor sits in the shade of his palm forest listening to the restless swish and whisper of fronds jostling in the breeze. Nearby, two pink flags wave beside two freshly dug holes, the future home of two more palms.

Merwin hopes that the stewards of the conservancy “will continue to try to grow as many species as possible of the world’s palms, wherever they can be acquired.” And of this botanical magnum opus, he says, “An abiding part of our hope is that a conservancy will want and will be able to save this bit of the Peahi streambed — what we have made here for those who come after us.”

Julia Shipley is an independent journalist, poet and small farmer in northern Vermont. 

The post A Place for Palms appeared first on American Forests.

By Jared Bernard

Find out how you can get involved in the battle for this important tree!

On the slopes of the subalpine zone of the Rocky Mountains, where the forested mountainsides give way to the treeless alpine mountaintops, a tree and a bird — whitebark pine and Clark’s nutcracker — repeat the steps of a dance they have danced for centuries, each helping the other species survive. But, the steps of the dance are becoming more difficult. A catastrophe is silently unfurling there — one that has the potential to unhinge the subalpine zone’s fragile community of organisms. The hardy, sprawling whitebark pine is now under siege from two battlefronts: a fungus and a beetle. If the whitebark pine loses the battle, it will have cascading effects for the entire ecosystem.

THE DANCE OF THE NUTCRACKER AND PINE

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is a white pine, having bundles of five needles. Often forming the “krummholz” forests — those whose trees are stunted and deformed as a result of surviving in harsh, exposed high elevations — these trees comprise the sparse canopy that protects the understory species. The whitebark’s nutritious seeds, which contain 21 percent protein and up to 52 percent fat, are essential to a community of seed-eating animals. The pines produce cones in huge quantities every two to three years, during so-called masting years. When that happens, every animal in the vicinity gorges on their seeds.

In particular, the whitebark pine has evolved a mutualistic relationship with a remarkable bird called the Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana). As if agreeing to terms in a contract, the whitebark pine relies almost exclusively upon the nutcracker for the dispersal of its seeds, and the nutcrackers owe a large part of their winter diet to the seeds from the whitebark’s thick-scaled cones, which they hammer open with their speciall adapted straight, black bills.

Teresa Lorenz is an expert in these species’ delicate relationship — studying their association by attaching an antenna to the birds. At the University of Idaho-Moscow, she uses radio-telemetry to study caching behavior in Clark’s nutcrackers. She describes how, each autumn, a nutcracker decides whether to become a resident of an area or emigrate away depending on the availability of whitebark seeds. According to her radio transmitter, resident nutcrackers make up to 10 trips per day to harvest and cache whitebark pine seeds, and each trip can be up to a 32-kilometer flight.

“But the mutualism between the nutcracker and the whitebark pine is inefficient,” Lorenz explains. Whitebark pine seeds don’t survive digestion, so being a major food source for many animals doesn’t actually help them germinate. They must be planted by a Clark’s nutcracker and then forgotten. The trouble is that nutcrackers have exceptional memories. They’ll cache tens of thousands of seeds and remember almost all of them for up to nine months. The whitebark’s lucky break is that, like an insurance policy, the nutcrackers tend to cache twice what they need to survive a winter.

That’s great except that in the eight sites of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains studied by Lorenz, her radio-telemetry has caught the nutcrackers red-handed caching whitebark pine seeds in all manner of places unsuitable for germination. These seeds require lots of light and cool temperatures, yet at Lorenz’s research sites, most of them are cached in lower elevations and under the dense canopy of other conifers, crowding the little seedlings with plenty of competition. She suspects that the nutcrackers do this to avoid having their caches buried under snow. To that end, she finds that when nutcrackers do cache seeds in this region’s whitebark-friendly high elevations, they usually stick them in treetops. “The nutcrackers statistically avoid caching in open areas or burns” — the very conditions ideal for whitebark pine — which could be to avoid predation by hawks, she says.

Between those that get eaten and cannot germinate, and the survivors that end up in unsuitable spots, ultimately “only 16 percent of whitebark seeds can potentially germinate” in these areas.

Lorenz explains that because a whitebark pine produces an average of a million seeds over its lifetime and only one is necessary to replace its parent, 16 percent would usually be more than enough. Now, though, the whitebark pine is under assault from two tenacious enemies.

WHITEBARK UNDER THREAT

The first of these enemies is a fungus, Cronartium ribicola, which causes the disease white pine blister rust. Its peculiar life cycle is split between five-needled pines like whitebark pine and currents, gooseberries and other plant hosts.

In the late summer, the rust forms a canker on the pine’s bark, below which fungal filaments burrow to extract nutrients. Once this fungus is pollinated by insects, it forms its eponymous pale yellow blister in the springtime. The following summer, the blister bursts and the fungus beneath it moves from dead tree tissue into the adjacent living bark — so the rust spreads like necrosis over the whitebark pine. The disease causes branches — sometimes cone-producing branches — to die by preventing water and nutrients from reaching them. If the main trunk is affected, the tree will die. “It’s like a living, but unproductive creature. It’s like a zombie tree,” says American Forests Science Advisory Board member Dr. Diana Tomback, an ecologist at the University of Colorado-Denver.

The fungus won’t spread to another tree from there, but that doesn’t mean nearby trees are safe. This is where the gooseberries and other understory hosts come in. When the blister bursts, a puff of yellow spores is released onto these hosts, and in the late summer and fall spores are released, infecting other pines. In this way, the fungus lives out its lifecycle — from pine, to gooseberry, to pine.

Dr. Tomback is the director of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, a nonprofit organization started in 2001. She started working on whitebark pine back when their populations were much healthier. “Now, you’ll see a stand that’s got cones and nutcrackers all over it,” she says, “but come back in five years and you’ll find them dead.”

Monika Maier is a University of Utah researcher surveying seed-harvesting patterns for populations in Glacier National Park. In some of Maier’s populations, every single tree is infected with blister rust. “The trees infested by blister rust die eventually, perhaps over several years,” Maier says soberly.

Even areas with relatively little blister rust may still be subjected to another threat. Enter the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), the notorious tiny beetle that remains the scourge of forestry in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. They burrow their way en masse into a mature pine to devour its phloem — the layer of underbark that carries a tree’s nutrients — as well as its soft pro-cambium layer that generates new wood.

The beetles release pheromones that attract others, so even if the victim is able to endure the initial attack, it will soon be engulfed by another onslaught. Tiny pores on the beetles’ mouths are laced with blue fungal spores that grow to invade the wood, staining it blue and damaging the xylem — the pathways through which the tree carries water. Ultimately, the pine dies from dehydration and starvation. Mountain pine beetles have killed scores of whitebark pines and, sadly, these beetles affect the few older, cone-producing trees resistant to blister rust.

In 2012, Lauren Barringer, another University of Colorado-Denver researcher, Dr. Tomback and others published an assessment of specific areas of whitebark pine in Montana’s Glacier National Park, Alberta’s Waterton Lakes National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In the areas studied, the mountain pine beetle was found to be attacking at least six percent of the whitebark pine in Glacier National Park and the adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park across the border in Alberta. Add in white pine blister rust and the picture becomes even bleaker: “The Glacier/Waterton Lakes area is disturbing,” Dr. Tomback laments. “There is up to 100 percent die-off. You’re hard-pressed to find a tree without a canker.” To the south, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, they found that 35 percent of whitebark pine is already dead as a result of the combined threats of beetles and blister rust and an additional 38 percent is currently under siege by beetles and may soon join them.

THE FUTURE OF THE PINE-NUTCRACKER DANCE

Lurking behind the scenes like a puppeteer is the biggest enemy to the survival of whitebark pine: climate change, which leaves trees more vulnerable to diseases like blister rust and has had astounding effects on the beetle population.

Mountain pine beetles require warmer temperatures for productivity, so their populations are usually kept at bay by severe winters in the high elevations of the Rockies. Since the outbreak began, the beetles have massacred 45 million acres in British Columbia and more than 3 million acres in west-central Alberta. They’ve now metastasized to destroy millions of acres in the United States as well, including the Greater Yellowstone Area. In total, more than 41 million acres of U.S. forest are estimated to be dead or dying.

Considering the close alliance the tree has with the Clark’s nutcracker, the precipitous decline of the whitebark pine begs the question of the nutcracker’s situation. But all data seems to point to the nutcrackers getting along just fine.

Dr. Joyce Gould, the science coordinator for Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation, and a board member of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation in Canada says flat out: “I think the nutcrackers don’t go into decline because they switch their food source.”

Dr. Gould confirms what Dr. Tomback has seen: The nutcrackers aren’t entirely dependent on whitebark pine seeds. They also enjoy summer fare of insects and will eat seeds from other conifers. Clark’s nutcrackers even take — or sometimes beg for — handouts from campers. Thus, researchers aren’t seeing a decline in the nutcracker that mirrors the decline in the whitebark pine.

Nonetheless, Maier believes that the nutcrackers begin to avoid places that whitebark pine has disappeared. She relates that in places like Glacier National Park, whitebark pine seeds may be the nutcracker’s primary food source, especially during winter, and it’s in places like this she fears a localized decline in Clark’s nutcracker.

The moribund whitebark pine itself has earned a conservation status of “Vulnerable” with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and is listed as Endangered under Schedule 1 of Canada’s Species At Risk Act (SARA).

In the United States, the whitebark pine’s status is more complicated. In 2010, the species was proposed for Endangered or Threatened status, but a year later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tabled it, calling it “warranted but precluded.” This means that the whitebark pine meets all the criteria for federal listing, but the title is withheld. This decision is the result of too many other species being deemed “higher priority” and jumping the queue ahead of whitebark pine, leaving no resources available to assess its status.

“Currently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ordered due dates through 2016,” says Mark Sattelberg, the officer coordinating the whitebark pine’s case in the Wyoming Field Office in Cheyenne. “That does not mean the work stops on the whitebark pine.” As a candidate species, its case must be reexamined each year.

“As the other species are completed, the whitebark pine will move up the priority list,” he says. When that finally happens, the Fish and Wildlife Service will take the IUCN and SARA listings under consideration, but will pay more attention to proposed recovery strategies.

STRATEGIES FOR RECOVERY

Such a strategy was released in June 2012 by American Forests Science Advisory Board member Dr. Bob Keane of the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, another member of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation board. “I don’t think the lack of listing has affected the restoration efforts one bit,” Dr. Keane says earnestly. “Restoration comes down to money and, as far as I know, there won’t be any additional monies for restoration once the species is listed.”

The recovery strategy outlines tactics on multiple scales, from the entire trans-boundary range of the whitebark pine to provinces and states, forests and even individual trees. Dr. Tomback, the strategy’s second author, stresses the importance of planting rust-resistant seedlings. In whitebark populations, some individuals will happen to be more resistant to rust. Collecting seeds from those trees and growing seedlings in special facilities like the Coeur d’Alene Nursery in Idaho will augment the number of trees in a population that have resistance to blister rust.

As the climate continues to change, the seeds collected from one population unfortunately may not produce seedlings that are adapted to the same location several years from now. To counter this, computer models will predict the regional climates in the years to come so seeds can be distributed accordingly by agencies and organizations like American Forests.

Individual trees will be protected from mountain pine beetles by using the deterrent verbenone, a natural chemical released by trees overwhelmed by bark beetles. Applying it to healthy trees confuses potential attackers into thinking the tree is already destroyed, so they move on. Verbenone proved useful against the southern pine beetle that was impacting the forestry of the southeastern U.S. and is so far proving helping in the fight for the whitebark pine.

“The best thing the strategy does is recognize the need for trans-boundary coordination,” Dr. Keane says. Dr. Tomback adds that working together on whitebark pine recovery will benefit both nations. “It behooves us all in this time of economic uncertainty to coordinate and share our efforts,” she implores. Otherwise, the fragile and mysterious array of life at the tree line of the Rocky Mountains will vanish.

Find out how you can get involved in the battle for this important tree!

Jared Bernard is an Edmonton-based freelance writer with a Bachelor of Science in ecology and evolution. His work currently appears in Natural History and The Gardener for the Prairies.

The post A Precarious Partnership of Pine and Bird appeared first on American Forests.

By Tom Persinger

The shack I stand looking at on this cold winter day was once a run-down chicken coop on an abandoned farm on the Wisconsin River. But, in 1935, this place would become Aldo Leopold’s weekend family retreat, living laboratory and the site where he would write one of America’s most enduring environmental masterpieces, “A Sand County Almanac.” It is also the land that would shape each of his children’s lifelong pursuits and passions.

Aldo Starker Leopold, Aldo’s oldest son, commonly called Starker, was already a young man by the time the Leopold family began their work to restore the farm to conditions resembling the days before its collapse from over-farming.

Even so, his time and effort there would prove foundational. In this place, Starker cleared brush, planted pines, built the outhouse affectionately referred to as “The Parthenon” and worked in his father’s living laboratory as they experimented with ways to manage wildlife. Starker would use these experiences and others to go on to a distinguished career as professor at University of California, Berkeley, author, forester, zoologist, conservationist and — perhaps most significantly — creator of the document that would shape over 50 years of National Park Service policy.

So, my visit this morning to Leopold’s shack and through the Leopold Pines is a visit to hallowed ground. And it is the beginning of my journey to uncover more about how the document this place inspired has shaped the course of land management history.

THE LEOPOLD REPORT: PRESERVING WILDERNESS

The report that would become one of the most significant in National Park Service history was born of a public relations disaster. In 1962, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall tasked Starker Leopold with addressing the issue of wildlife population control in national parks. Udall’s request was formed in response to the public outcry brought upon by park personnel killing over 4,000 elk in Yellowstone National Park in the winter of 1961.

Elk were a major tourist attraction in Yellowstone and park management assumed that more elk would lure even more visitors. However, through an unfortunate combination of predator control and winter feeding, the elk population ballooned far beyond what the ecosystem could support and was beginning to adversely impact other species. The park service hadn’t foreseen the public outcry the cull would create: Newspapers and television coverage created strong public opposition and congressional hearings.

The park service needed to find a way out of this mishap. What had seemed like a straightforward method to return the elk population to sustainable numbers became the impetus for a complete reconsideration of how the park system was managing its resources. Leopold and his committee of five distinguished scientists created a document called “Wildlife Management in the National Parks,” which would come to be known simply as “The Leopold Report.”

The “Leopold Report” focused around the principles that we should preserve lands in the state in which settlers from Europe would have found them and that we should not simply protect wildlife through designated protected areas, but also actively maintain and restore populations of native species.

Looking back on the report today, I think it’s important to note that Leopold was only tasked with the consideration of wildlife management issues, specifically, as he put it in the report, “the procedure of removing excess ungulates from some of the parks.” But he went on to say that it was his feeling that “this specific question can only be viewed objectively in the light of goals and operational policies.” The visionary 23-page report, far more expansively considered than even Udall had anticipated, was written with those goals and policies in mind and would become the National Park Service’s guiding philosophical document for the next 50 years. Examining Leopold’s landmark work in light of a recently released report that actively considers contemporary issues facing the park system should make for an interesting exercise.

When the report was penned in 1963, times were different; the National Park Service (NPS) was smaller, their holdings and visitors far fewer, and many of today’s significant issues such as sprawl and climate change weren’t extraordinary concerns. In 1963, there were 29 national parks. Today, the park service manages 59 official parks, a total of 401 units, more than 84 million acres of land, 85,000 miles of rivers and waterways and 4.5 million acres of oceans, lakes and reservoirs — all of which are visited by more than 282 million people per year.

REVISITING LEOPOLD: FLEXIBILITY IN THE FACE OF CHANGE

The park service is preparing to celebrate their 100th anniversary in 2016. And, in preparation for the next 100 years, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis launched the “Call to Action Plan” in 2011 to “prepare for the second century of stewardship.” The plan lists 39 action items for the park service to accomplish prior to the centennial celebration and includes as action point 21 “the preparation of a contemporary version of the 1963 “Leopold Report” that confronts modern challenges in natural and cultural resource management.”

To create this new report, Jarvis commissioned an 11-member panel of scientists, including two Nobel laureates and two Presidential Medal of Science recipients, to revisit Leopold’s 1963 landmark document and provide a vision to guide the next 50 years that would address the new challenges the park service faces. In particular, the report would need to address management in the face of accelerating environmental changes including biodiversity loss, climate change, habitat fragmentation, invasive species and more. The final report, “Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks,” was completed August 25, 2012.

The report is similar to the original “Leopold Report” in many ways. Both begin with similar questions that guide their recommendations and discussions.

While the original report asks what the goals of wildlife management in the parks should be, the 2012 report expands this question to include not just wildlife, but resource management in general. Both reports ask what management policies can achieve those goals and how those policies can be implemented.

The recommendations of both reports are at a high level, offering neither implementation suggestions nor specific situational suggestions, but rather — as it’s put in “Revisiting Leopold” — “general answers to the questions posed by the committee” intended to steer future park service policy consideration and decision-making. The 2012 report, for example, emphasizes the need for the National Park Service to “establish a standing Science Advisory Board that includes representatives from a range of disciplines within the scientific community” that should be given specific responsibilities for maximum effectiveness. However, the report leaves the question of what those specific responsibilities might be for the park service to answer.

Both reports agree that management based on scientific research is essential. Most will agree that science-based decision-making would be best, but one is left to question from where the necessary money to fund this board will materialize. Fortunately, neither commission was tasked with figuring out either the cost of implementing their suggestions or where those funds might be found. The constraint of funding can be significant and often can dampen visionary and inspired thought. The National Park Service’s budget has been steadily shrinking and with less and less money available, one must wonder where the funding will be found to execute Revisiting Leopold’s recommendations to “steward NPS resources for continuous change that is not yet fully understood.”

“Revisiting Leopold” recognizes that its authors have “neither accepted all of Leopold’s conclusions nor rejected them out of hand,” and that several findings remain significant, including:

• The need for the park service to recognize the enormous complexity of ecologic communities and the diversity of management procedures required to preserve them.
• The necessity that management may involve active manipulation of plant and animal communities, or protection from modification or external influences.
• The high importance of science to stewardship, such that the “Leopold Report” urged the expansion of research activity to prepare for future management and restoration programs.

But the two reports are not all similar. While Leopold mainly confined his suggestions in the original report to park land itself, Revisiting Leopold, with its focus on the need to adapt in the face of change, differs by advocating a park system that “should become a core element of a national network of lands and waters … managed for resiliency and connectivity.”

BIOTIC LAND USE, YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

The idea of potentially expanding the intended sphere of park service influence over lands that are not directly controlled might make it more difficult to realize significant, tangible results. With fostered collaboration, however, it’s not impossible. Aldo Leopold conducted a successful experiment in the 1930s that was known as the Riley Game Cooperative. It recognized the expansive interconnection of habitat and wildlife, nurtured collaboration between hunters from the city and those from the country and encouraged those who owned land to work with those who did not towards achieving a common goal to manage wildlife. I believe that Leopold would have fully supported the 2012 report’s articulation of park lands as integral pieces of a larger whole.

I’m thinking of this while walking through a grove of Leopold pines. These now towering trees are the direct result of the efforts of Aldo, Starker and the entire Leopold family to restore the farm to the natural condition that existed before it was ravaged by years of poor agricultural practices. The family planted thousands of these trees and I believe they represent the roots found in the “Leopold Report” recommendations. They were a part of Aldo’s efforts to test ideas and management practices toward what he called biotic land-use: a land management idea that worked toward “conserving land by keeping plants and animals favorable.”

Starker Leopold’s original report contained the often-maligned idea that national parks were intended to re-create a “primitive vignette of America.” This notion has often been criticized for being idealistic and nostalgic and is altogether eliminated in the new document. The idea that has replaced it — the recognition that there should be an approach in which the “functional qualities of biodiversity, evolutionary potential and system resilience matter as much as observable features of iconic species and grand land and seascapes” — matches Leopold’s biotic land-use in spirit, but differs in approach. This “protection of habitats that may serve as climate refugia” may mean that invasive or exotic species might be allowed to persist outside of their original range if climate change has pushed them to the place as their last, best place to survive. And, considering the increasing rate of climate change, responsible for melting glaciers and rising sea levels, this is critical to consider.

Although a significant oversimplification, I think that while both reports advocate management for rather than of the ecosystem, Leopold’s 1963 report was managing for a paradigm that was less focused on flux and change while “Revisiting Leopold” recognizes ecological relationships as living, dynamic and uncertain. “Revisiting Leopold” offers what it calls the precautionary principle as a tool moving forward in the face of that uncertainty. It “requires that stewardship decisions reflect science-informed prudence and restraint.” Moving forward is never easy, and moving forward into the unknown can be paralyzing without the toolset and method with which to do so.

Toward its end, “Revisiting Leopold” offers a few steps toward the effective implementation of its policy recommendations.

• The NPS should undertake a major, systematic and comprehensive review of its policies, despite the risk and uncertainty that this effort may entail.
• NPS will need to significantly expand the role of science in the agency.
• Expanded scientific capacity must be interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary.
• NPS should establish a standing Science Advisory Board.
• NPS must also expand its capacity to manage natural and cultural resources efficiently across large-scale landscapes.
• NPS should function as a scientific leader in documenting and monitoring conditions of the park system.
• NPS managers must be supported with the necessary funds and personnel.

Considering the size and scope of NPS operations, it will be interesting to see how these recommendations are utilized to guide and develop future policy decisions. A leaner, more efficient organization is desirable, but could be difficult to achieve considering the current lack of financial support. Equally interesting to see will be if these recommendations prove to have the same staying power and long-term vision as Leopold’s initial report.

Though it seems obvious, I think it’s important to point out that there could not be a “Revisiting Leopold” without the original 1963 report. And reading through the new report, I’m left wondering: What if Starker had been tasked with providing a plan for comprehensive park system management? Would he have created a document that might have surpassed the vision and scope of this team’s recommendations? Both teams’ tasks were extraordinary and both documents provide plenty of fodder to consider and to fuel decision-making.

I march through ankle-deep snow, past the shuttered shack down to the frozen Wisconsin River. Chunks of ice drift down the waterway, knocking and bouncing off the thick, frozen crust that radiates out from the bank. Suddenly, a loud “pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks and cries” — the very cries that may have inspired those words in Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” — pierces the snowy silence. I look up and a sedge of cranes circles overhead, wings motionless as they descend beyond the trees and out of sight.

I realize that it’s because of people like Aldo and Starker Leopold, and the hundreds and thousands of others who care about preserving and protecting our wild places, that I am fortunate enough to be here on the shore of a frozen river near a simple wooden shack and see these extraordinary creatures and hear the sound that Aldo Leopold called the “trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” And I can’t think of any other recent experience that caused me to feel more humble and hopeful about the wild places in America.

Tom Persinger is a photographer and writer based in Pittsburgh, Pa. Read more at www.tompersinger.com. 

Read Aldo Leopold’s original writings in American Forests.

The post The Leopold Legacy appeared first on American Forests.

A Plea for Preserving a Few Primitive Forests, Untouched by Motor Cards and Tourist Camps, Where Those Who Enjoy Canoe of Pack Trips in Wild Country May Fulfill Their Dreams

By Aldo Leopold

First published in American Forests and Forest Life, Vol. 31, No. 382, October 1925

In 1925, conservation legend Aldo Leopold published this appeal for wilderness preservation in American Forests, then already in its 30th year. Though many things have changed and our knowledge of forest ecosystems has improved, many of his words remain relevant today. See for yourself: Take a trip back in time with The Last Stand of the Wilderness. And stay tuned for our new feature, The Leopold Legacy, examining how Leopold’s lessons to his son, Starker, author of 1963’s “The Leopold Report,” continue to influence wildlife management to this day.

How many of those whole-hearted conservationists who berate the past generation for its short-sightedness in the use of natural resources have stopped to ask themselves for what new evils the next generation will berate us?

Has it ever occurred to us that we may unknowingly be just as short-sighted as our forefathers in assuming certain things to be inexhaustible, and becoming conscious of our error only after they have practically disappeared?

Today it is hard for us to understand why our prodigious waste of standing timber was allowed to go on — why the exhaustion of the supply was not earlier foreseen. Some even impute to the wasters a certain moral turpitude. We forget that for many generations the standing timber of America was in fact an encumbrance or even an enemy, and that the nation was simply unconscious of the possibility of its becoming exhausted. In fact, our tendency is not to call things resources until the supply runs short. When the end of the supply is in sight we “discover” that the thing is valuable.

This has been true of the latest natural resource to be “discovered,” namely the group of things collectively called Outdoor Recreation. We had to develop tenements and tired businessmen before Outdoor Recreation was recognized as a category of human needs, though the use of the outdoors for recreational purposes is as old as the race itself. This “discovery” that we need a national policy on Outdoor Recreation is in fact so new that the ink has barely dried on its birth certificate. And, as usual, we are becoming conscious of thousands of wasteful errors in the past handling of recreational resources which an earlier discovery might have avoided.

I submit that this endless series of more or less post-mortem discoveries is getting rather tedious. I for one am piqued in my sense of national pride. Can not we for once foresee and provide? Must it always be hindsight, followed by hurried educational work, laborious legislative campaigns, and then only partially effective action at huge expense? Can not we for once use foresight, and provide for our needs in an orderly, ample, correlated, economical fashion?

The next resource, the exhaustion of which is due for “discovery,” is the wilderness. The purpose of this article is to show why the wilderness is valuable, how close it is to exhaustion and why, and what can be done about it.

Wild places are the rock-bottom foundation of a good many different kinds of outdoor play, including pack and canoe trips in which hunting, fishing, or just exploring may furnish the flavoring matter. By “wild places” I mean wild regions big enough to absorb the average man’s two weeks’ vacation without getting him tangled up in his own back track. I also mean big areas wild enough to be free from motor roads, summer cottages, launches, or other manifestations of gasoline. Driving a pack train across or along a graded highway is distinctly not a pack trip — it is merely exercise, with about the same flavor as lifting dumb-bells. Neither is canoeing in the wake of a motor launch or down a lane of summer cottages a canoe trip. That is paddling — and the supply is unlimited.

Is the opportunity for wilderness trips valuable? Let us apply the test of the market price. Any number of well-to-do sportsmen are paying from $3,000 to $10,000 for a single big-game trip to the wilderness regions of British Columbia, Alaska, Mexico, Africa and Siberia. It is worth that to them. Now how about the fellow who has the same tastes for wilderness travel but a lesser pocketbook, and who probably has more real need of recreation? He simply has to do without, subsisting as best he can on polite trips to summer resorts and dude ranches. Why? Because the old wilderness hunting grounds, formerly within his reach, no longer exist, having been opened up by motor roads.

Right here I had better explain that motor roads, cottages, and launches do not necessarily destroy hunting and fishing, but they destroy the wilderness, which to certain tastes is quite as important.

Neither do I imply that motors, cottages, summer resorts, and dude ranches are not in themselves highly valuable recreational assets. Obviously they are. Only they are a different kind of recreation. We need to preserve as many different kinds as we possibly can. The civilized kinds tend to preserve themselves through the automatic operation of economic laws. But wilderness travel is a kind that tends to disappear under the automatic operation of economic laws, just as the site for a city park tends to disappear with the growth of a city. Unlike the city park, however, the wilderness can not be recreated when the need for it is determined by hind-sight. The need for it must be determined by foresight, and the necessary areas segregated and preserved. Wilderness is the one kind of playground which mankind can not build to order.

Since the pilgrims landed, the supply of wilderness has always been unlimited. Now, of a sudden, the end is in sight. The really wild places within reach of the centers of population are going or gone. As a nation, however, we are so accustomed to a plentiful supply that we are unconscious of what the disappearance of wild places would mean, just as we are unconscious of what the disappearance of winds or sunsets would mean. The opportunity to disappear into the tall uncut has existed so long that we unconsciously assume it, like the wind and sunset, to be one of the fixed facts of Nature. And who can measure the influence of these “fixed facts of Nature” on the national character? In all the category of outdoor vocations and outdoor sports there is not one, save only the tilling of the soil, that bends and molds the human character like wilderness travel. Shall this fundamental instrument for building citizens be allowed to disappear from America, simply because we lack the vision to see its value? Would we rather have the few paltry dollars that could be extracted from our remaining wild places than the human values they can render in their wild condition?

A national policy for the establishment of wilderness recreation grounds would in some instances be easy to put into operation if we act at once. The National Forests and Parks still contain a few splendid areas of relatively low value for other purposes, which could be readily segregated as roadless playgrounds. Wilderness areas in the National Forests would serve especially the wilderness hunter, since hunting is not and should not be allowed in the Parks. On the other hand, wilderness areas in the National Parks would serve all kinds of wilderness lovers except the hunter. In general, I believe that both the Forest Service and the Park Service would be receptive to the wilderness idea, but neither can be expected to execute it with the vigor and despatch necessary to save the situation, unless they can point to a definite crystallized public demand for such action. The public being still largely unconscious that the end of the wild places is in sight, there is as yet no articulate public expression for or against the wilderness plan. Meanwhile the remaining wild areas in both the Forests and Parks are being pushed back by road construction at a very rapid rate, so rapid that unless something is done, the large areas of wilderness will mostly disappear within the next decade.

This paper is a plea for a definite expression of public opinion on the question of whether a system of wilderness areas should be established in our public Forests and Parks.

Let me illustrate what I mean by saying that administrative officers can not effectively execute a wilderness policy without the help of a definite public demand. District Forester Frank C. W. Pooler has already tentatively designated the headwaters of the Gila River, in the Gila National Forest, New Mexico, as a wilderness area. It is the last roadless area of any size in the Southwest containing all the best types of mountain wild life and scenery, and by reason of its exceedingly broken topography is the logical location for a wilderness playground. It is Mr. Pooler’s belief that the Forest Service should withhold extending its road system into the Gila Wilderness, and should withhold granting permits for summer homes in it, until the whole wilderness idea has had an opportunity to crystallize into a definite policy, under which a final plan for handling the Gila Wilderness can be laid down.

Now suppose that a timber operator were to apply to build a railroad into this area thus tentatively reserved for wilderness purposes. Suppose the District Forester were to reply: ”No. This area is being held for public recreation as a wilderness hunting ground.” The lumber operator answers: “I haven’t heard of the public wanting wilderness hunting grounds. Where is this public, and just what does it want?” Obviously, unless there existed some clear expression of public need, and a definite official policy for meeting it, the District Forester’s position would be untenable, no matter how certain he felt that it was right. The point is that governmental policies can not be actually applied without many decisions by administrative officers involving the adjustment of conflicting interests. In such conflicts individual or economic interests may always be counted upon to be articulate. Group or public interests must likewise be made articulate, else they place the government executive in the thankless and often untenable position of being at once judge of the conflict and counsel for an absentee. The public interest must “speak up or lose out.” The dangers of delay in formulating a national policy for the establishment of wilderness recreation grounds are strongly emphasized in the present situation of the Lake States. In the last few years many people have begun to realize that wilderness canoe trips are about to become a thing of the past in the Lake States, because of the extension of tourist roads and summer resorts into the remnants of wild country.

The proximity of the Lake States to the centres of population in the Middle West, and the fact that canoe travel is a distinctive type of wilderness life not to be found elsewhere south of the Canadian border except in Maine, adds to the vital need for such a project.

But what to do about it is a difficult problem. The national land holdings consist of three little National Forests, The Superior, Minnesota, and Michigan. Their combined area is woefully inadequate. Moreover, they are more or less riddled with private holdings which, until eliminated by land exchanges, constitute serious obstacles to any and all future plans for developing the full public value of these Forests. The Izaac Walton League and the Superior National Forest Recreation Association, with a foresight for which they deserve much credit, have insisted that at least one wilderness area be established in the Lake States on these national lands. But this is easier said than done. An incredible number of complications and obstacles, too intricate to be here discussed, arise from the fact that the wilderness idea was born after, rather than before, the normal course of commercial development had begun. The existence of these complications is nobody’s fault. But it will be everybody’s fault if they do not serve as a warning against delaying the immediate inauguration of a comprehensive system of wilderness areas in the West, where there is still a relatively unimpeded field for action.

A start toward such a system has already been made at the initiative of the Forest Service. The hinterland around Jackson Hole, including the Grand Tetons and Two-Ocean Pass, are entered as “roadless” in the recreations plans for the future. Likewise, that part of the Absoraka Forest between Boulder Creek and Yellowstone Park, the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in central Idaho, and parts of the Clearwater country in Montana are so classified. The Gila area in New Mexico has been already mentioned. What now seems to me important is for the government to undertake and the public to support the establishment of similar areas in every state that still contains National Forest or Park lands suitable for wilderness purposes.

The big thing that stands in the way of such a program is the well-nigh universal assumption that advance action is unnecessary. “Why, this area never will be opened up!” That was said ten years ago about many an area that has since been broken up. I know of five in the Southwest alone. It is being said today, and unless we clearly realize the danger, it will continue to be said until the chances for adequate action are gone.

Let us now consider some of the practical details of how the proposed system of wilderness areas should be administered. It is, for instance, a moot question whether regulated timber cutting should be allowed in them. If the conditions are such that the cuttings would leave motor roads in their wake, I would say “no.” But in the Lake States much logging can be done over the lakes, without any trunk roads, so that it seems to me possible, by skillful planning, permanently to use much of the remaining wild country for both wilderness recreation and timber production without large sacrifice of either use.

Another question is that of fire. Obviously the construction of trails, phone lines, and towers necessary for fire control must be not only allowed but encouraged. But how about roads? Wherever the opponents of the idea can argue that unless the country is opened up it will burn up, there is no chance for the wilderness. Let us take the Gila as an example. I think it can be confidently asserted that on the Gila, extension of roads is not necessary for good fire protection. The Forest Service, with its system of lookouts, telephone lines, and trails, is successfully handling the fires, even during the bad years. The percentage of lightning as compared with man-caused fires on the Gila is very high (65 per cent lightning; 35 per cent man-caused). As a rule the greater the percentage of lightning fires, the more serious is the handicap of inaccessibility. The reason for this is that man-caused fires are usually increased by building roads and letting in more transients, whereas lightning fires remain the same. Therefore a heavy lightning region like the Gila ought to be a severe test of the practicability of controlling fires in roadless areas. As already stated, that test has been thus far successful.

I do not imply, however, that this one case disposes of the argument. The game of fire-control is too complicated to be comprehended in “rules of thumb.” There may be regions here and there where fire control is impossible without roads. If so, we must have roads in such regions, wilderness or no wilderness. But there may with equal likelihood be other regions where the reverse is true. The whole fire question in its relation to the wilderness plan is one of skill in selecting and administering each particular area. Such skill is already available among the forest officers who have devoted years of study to fire control as well as a dozen other related forest problems.

The acceptance of the idea of wilderness areas entails, I admit, a growth in the original conception of National Forests. The original purposes were timber production and watershed protection, and these are and must always remain the primary purposes. But the whole subsequent history of these Forests has been a history of the appearance and growth of new uses, which, when skillfully adjusted to the primary uses and to each other, were one by one provided for and the net public benefit correspondingly increased. Public recreation was one of these. When the forests were first established, recreation did not exist in the minds of either the foresters or the public as an important use of the public Forests. Today it has been added to timber production and watershed protection as an important additional public service. It has been proven that skillful administration can provide for both in the same system of Forests without material sacrifice of either.

One wilderness area could, I firmly believe, be fitted into the National Forests of each State without material sacrifice of other kinds of playgrounds or other kinds of uses. Additional wilderness areas could, it seems to me, be fitted into the various National Parks. As far as I can see there would usually be necessary neither new costs nor new laws nor new work — simply a well-pondered administrative decision delimiting the areas, and in such area establishing a permanent “closed season” on roads, cottages, or other developments inimical to the wilderness use.

To urge that wilderness playgrounds are unnecessary because ample forest playgrounds of other kinds are already being established is just as idle as to urge that there is no need for public tennis courts because there are already public golf links. The two things represent differing needs of different people, each entitled to recognition in due proportion to their numbers and importance. The people in need of wilderness areas are numerous, and the preservation of their particular kind of contact with Mother Earth is a national problem of the first magnitude.

Now what do the lovers of wilderness trips have to say about it? The last National Conference on Outdoor Recreation said nothing. This Conference is the official agency for extending recognition to new needs of this kind, dovetailing them with other and possibly conflicting needs, and thus determining for each its place in the sun. If any individual or group believe in the wilderness idea, or have any one place where they believe it should be applied, now is the time to make known their belief.

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Why did you choose to go into forestry?    

For love of the outdoors and learning the importance of trees and forests to water, fish and wildlife. As a kid in Dayton, Ohio, I worked with a Junior Sportsman’s club to try to improve the area around an old gravel pit.

What is your favorite aspect or favorite part of your field?    

Having concentrated on Urban Forestry, I’ve learned to appreciate the many values that trees provide cities, large and small, toward improving the environment where we live.

What is the most surprising thing that you have learned or discovered?    

When challenging conventional wisdom regarding maple decline some 40 years ago, we were able to convince others that the cause was a deficiency of manganese, not iron.  Also that urban forests are significantly more diverse than surrounding “woodlots” and that a single urban tree is equivalent to about 15 woods trees in ameliorating CO2 problems.

What was the most difficult moment or encounter that you’ve experienced in pursuit of your work?      

Probably the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council’s listening session held in Biloxi, Miss., witnessing the devastation of Katrina, and the aftermath of the Oakland hillsides fire which was in large part due to the planting of too many eucalyptus — which are almost explosive. Observing these events makes us realize how helpless we can be in such natural disasters.

Do you have a favorite story from your years in the field?  

When in Austria, I was introduced to unique hats from Romania made by forest loggers from shelf fungus conks. When showing them, usually everyone — even plant pathologists — would misidentify them as buckskin. Another favorite story was many years ago, preparing sassafras tea for a class. Shortly after providing a taste test, I discovered I had contracted poison ivy on my hands when digging the roots to make the tea; my whole career flashed by as I could imagine the news headlines from poisoning a whole class with poison ivy — scary, but luckily it didn’t happen quite that way.

What do you think the biggest issue facing forest health is today?      

The changing climate that we seem to be experiencing, which can greatly modify growth factors of plants and their many pests — invasives like EAB, as a recent example.

Where was the most interesting, most intriguing, most impactful or favorite place you were able to travel to in the name of science and why?    

Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River before — and after — completion of the dam.

Who is your favorite fictional scientist and why?     

I, too, as my colleague Dr. McCullough, am impressed by Dr. Shelton Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory,” who in so many ways epitomizes the stereotypical arrogant egghead lacking common sense.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would you be and why?    

I can’t imagine it, but I guess possibly a lawyer trying to untangle people’s legal problems — perhaps especially tree and environmental issues — or a travel agent or guide to places like the Galapagos Islands or Banff National Park.

Where is your favorite spot to experience nature and why?   

Almost any place dominated by trees, with water and providing a feeling of solitude.  Getting to such a place allows a feeling of oneness with nature, even in the middle of Washington, D.C., in Rock Creek Park, which can also provide this serenity.

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