Studying ecological restoration

SISTERS — Kneeling among the grasses and flowers of Camp Polk Meadow, ecologist Karen Allen identified the different species making appearances for a group of college students gathered around. There was tumble mustard with its little yellow flowers, the similar-looking flixweed, meadow foxtail, Kentucky bluegrass and, of course, the pervasive and invasive cheatgrass.

She posed a question: Should all the cheatgrass be mowed, or should the area be sprayed to stem its growth? Or should it be left alone?

“This is a real-world big issue at Camp Polk,” said Allen, a restoration ecologist with the Bend-based consulting company Aequinox. “What do we do with the weeds?

To answer that question, it helps to scientifically and methodically monitor the site over time, she said. That way, scientists can determine whether the weeds are taking off, clogging up the meadow, or if the cheatgrass might start to give way to native vegetation in several years.

So last week, with cold winds blowing across the meadow northeast of Sisters, Allen showed the students how to set up a surveying plot and take 256 data points to get a snapshot of the plant life.

It was just one part of a two-week field course in ecological restoration, led by Matt Orr, a biology instructor with the University of Oregon. Camping in the Metolius Preserve, the nine students take on tasks ranging from mapping a timber project to studying the effect of grazing, with the goal of gaining hands-on experience, and learning how to design and carry out restoration projects and monitoring.

“One of the things that’s made the program good is just the total immersion,” Orr said. “They’re really living what the course is all about.”

Students study restoration, but mostly get out in the field to figure out how to design experiments, use surveying equipment, take data points and more. While other laboratory classes might have experiments set up for students to do, in the restoration ecology class students are doing studies that could help guide future restoration projects. Orr teaches a similar class during the school year, but in that class the students don’t camp on-site.

“We’re doing stuff that eventually we hope to publish,” Orr said. “It’s not just, ‘Let’s do this so you can get a sense of things.’”

For Damien Hawley-Jones, a junior at Humboldt State University in California who signed up for the summer course, the idea of camping out and doing field work appealed to him.

“A lot of the classes I’ve had have been more theory than practice,” he said.

The University of Oregon restoration ecology class, however, is a chance to try out some of those theories and gain practical experience.

“You can read about using tools like this,” he said, holding a device that helps map trees and stumps. “But it’s much easier to do it yourself. ... It’s a really good experience for people to do what they read about.”

From creek to forest

The students tackle several studies, Orr said.

They go to Glaze Meadow near Black Butte Ranch, where contractors with the U.S. Forest Service started cutting trees this winter as part of a project designed to restore old-growth forest conditions.

“We’re creating a map of what the forest looks like now, after the thinning,” he said, to try to determine if the tree densities, clumps and open areas that the Forest Service wanted to create actually happened on the ground.

The students also head east to the Crooked River watershed, where they study the impacts of cattle grazing on riverbanks and see if keeping cows out of an area spurs recovery.

There, the Bureau of Land Management has fenced off areas where livestock can’t graze, but has not been able to see if it makes a difference in the structure of the banks and the surrounding plant life.

“They set up a pretty nice study, but ran out of funding to do it,” Orr said.

Another area of focus close to the course’s base camp at the Metolius Preserve is an experiment testing whether the way a tree dies changes how animals use it — for instance, whether white-headed woodpeckers prefer beetle-killed trees or ones that have had the tops cut off.

Preliminary studies suggest that woodpeckers like searching for food in the beetle-killed trees, but a couple of the birds also have been spotted around the lopped trees.

And at Camp Polk, the students are monitoring how plants are responding to a higher groundwater table, after a large effort to create a new, meandering path for Whychus Creek.

“Everybody know how to use a compass?” Allen asked at the meadow, as she was showing half the class how to set up a surveying plot.

She demonstrated how to use the device — noting that it comes in handy when a GPS unit runs out of batteries — and helped them mark off a 150-by-150-foot plot. Every 10 feet, the students placed a flag in the ground, noting which plants it hit on the way down.

For Humboldt State graduate student Becca Langhans, the class is a way to review restoration concepts and apply them to a field setting. And it could help lead to a job in the future.

“Most places don’t care about academia. They want to see more experience, and time in the field, and real-life applications,” she said.

A new generation

The need for restoration ecologists will grow in the coming years, said Brad Chalfant, executive director of the Deschutes Land Trust, which manages Camp Polk and several other sites where the class has projects. It will take decades of restoration efforts to try to help the habitat damage by the BP oil spill, he noted. And closer to home, there’s still a lot to do to improve the creeks and streams to support runs of fish.

“To sustain salmon and steelhead runs in a place like Central Oregon, it’s going to require a new generation of scientists and a much larger group than we have today, who understand the dynamics of ecosystem restoration,” Chalfant said.

Having studies about how the vegetation in Camp Polk is responding to the new path of Whychus Creek can help the Land Trust determine how to continue to improve habitat on the properties, he said.

“All of our management is intended to be driven by the best science,” Chalfant said. “So this provides an avenue to improve our management out on all of our preserves.”

And getting students out in the field — whether they’re college age or elementary schoolers — helps instill a connection with nature, and inspire future land stewards, he said.

“It’s connecting people to a place, inspiring them to take part in pretty profound work,” Chalfant said.