Forest Service Experimental Forests and Long-term Data Sets: Stories of Their Meaning to Station Directors

Abstract

As Forest Service Research and Development worked to prepare this book reporting important results from long-term research conducted on U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges, the station directors added a chapter to highlight additional accounts of long-term research, its benefits to land managers and policy makers, and lessons learned from the first century of research on Experimental Forests and Ranges. The Northern Research Station described research on tree care and the opening it created to urban natural resource research. The Pacific Southwest Research Station described a series of studies on the relationships among logging, landslides, and water quality that began in 1963 and continues through the present. The International Institute of Tropical Forestry described pioneering work in measuring tree growth in tropical forests. The Pacific Northwest Research Station showed how conclusions vary with the length of an environmental record, and the ways in which their research has contributed to understanding old-growth forests. The Southern Research Station highlighted the contributions of the Coweeta EFR to the science of forest ecosystem hydrology. The Rocky Mountain Research Station showed how data from even a single plot measured over many decades can enhance our understanding of forests and environmental change. Lessons learned include the importance of data quality, sampling intensity and consistency, scale, scientific creativity, and manipulative research. These stories also show us that sites on which long-term data have been collected can serve as settings for important conversations about important social and management questions.