U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief for Research & Development, and NCSAF member, Dr. Ann Bartuska, was our luncheon speaker on Thursday, January 18, with a talk entitled, “Back to the Future: The Legacy of the Experimental Forests and Ranges.”

Ann began with some history, informing us that in 1908, the first experimental watershed was established by Dr. Raphael Zon in Arizona. Thus began a remarkable legacy, a network of E xperimental Forests and Ranges (EF&Rs) that today is representative of 80 percent of the forest cover types of the United States. These EF&R’s have provided and continue to be a source of scientific information for the management of the National Forests, industrial and private lands. The major objective is that EF&Rs be used for conducting applied research that serves as a basis for the management of forests and rangelands.

There are more than 78 EF&R research sites which make the USDA Forest Service unique among land management agencies. Each EF&R research site has a long history of experimentation and research which contributes information that provides current and future answers to questions concerning impacts of management activities and their mitigation, and how to better achieve management goals. Research on EF&Rs has also greatly contributed to a better fundamental understanding of how ecosystems work. This work has long been recognized as having regional, national and international importance.

Most EF&Rs have uniquely valuable long-term studies and monitoring efforts that provide an invaluable record of recovery from disturbance, and allow unusual events to be placed in the context of larger spatial and temporal patterns. EF&Rs address questions on forest management at the appropriate scales of time and space, and are places to learn fundamentals of natural ecosystem structure and dynamics. Finally, each EF&R represents areas with a broad range of disturbance and recovery with well known land use history, protected under special land-use designations that allow manipulative research and protection of control sites (i.e. a secure research platform). The Forest Service has invested tens of millions of dollars into infrastructure, experiments and long-term data collection and maintenance of EF&Rs. The activities of these resources are managed and maintained jointly by Forest Service Research and Development and the National Forest System.

Why Back to the Future? The scientific community is seeing a surge of ecological observatory networks as a result of such complex environmental questions as climate change. The ability to understand future change will be built upon a foundation of the past patterns and trends. The investment by the Forest Service, Agricultural Research Service, USGS, and others in long-term studies and measurements is the basis for understanding these trends. These temporal analyses, combined with the spatial scale of our experimental forest, ranges and watersheds, will enable a much better understanding of ecosystem change.

If you’re interested in more information on the Experimental Forests and Ranges administered by the Forest Service, contact Ralph Crawford, Forest Service National Program Leader for Range & Ecology Research at (703) 605-5253 or rcrawford01@fs.fed.us.