Scientists take on the ecosystem - Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest laboratory

On a sunny September afternoon a group of bureaucrats sits cross-legged in the meager shade of an east-side ponderosa pine. One speaks passionately of soil, another of fire, yet another of insects. Their give and take is as heated as the California sun blazing down between brittle green needles. The dialogue could affect national forest management from Canada to Baja.

For the first time in its 89-year history, the USDA Forest Service is studying what really goes on in the western woods. Its laboratory is Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre tract on Lassen National Forest in California 300 miles northeast of San Francisco. The dozen debating bureaucrats are Forest Service scientists whose expertise runs the gamut from brown creepers and bark beetles to carbon budgets, fire history, arid the reproductive cycles of the golden mantled ground squirrel. They have assembled at Blacks Mountain for a unique study, broad-based in scope and bold for an agency often criticized for its preoccupation with growing bigger and better boards.

"We have data that tells us lots and lots about trees, but it doesn't tell us anything about the ecosystem," says team leader Kathleen Harcksen, a Forest Service forester. "If we're going to provide forests into the future and not just lock everything up, we've got to understand how forest systems interrelate."

At Blacks Mountain the interdisciplinary team of scientists has launched a series of forest experiments designed to respond to questions being asked by an increasingly demanding public - the big questions about biodiversity, ecosystem management, and the long-term future of the nation's natural resources. For answers, the scientists are looking to pine snags, hairy woodpeckers, wood rats, soil fungi - everything that plays a role in what lives and dies and recycles back into the forest.

At their disposal are 2,500 acres of regal old-growth trees whose majestic crowns tower over a pristine, park-like forest floor. The Forest Service researchers also have access to around 100 acres of commercial clearcut where a scattering of spindly pines is slowly establishing a new forest. Between these extremes are over 6,000 acres where their predecessors experimented with insect salvage harvests, commercial thinning and logging that removed 85 percent of the merchantable timber.

And they have data - box upon cardboard box of data delivered to the scientists' Redding, California, office from the federal archives. Blacks Mountain is one of the few forests in the United States with more than 50 years of records on forest structure, says Phil Aune, silvicultural lab program manager. Designated in 1934 as an investigative site for the Pacific Southwest Research Station, it was the focus of experiments conducted by the Forest Service as early as 1910. Those experiments detail various silvicultural methods and the best available techniques for harvesting and hauling timber. The data is limited by the questions that were asked, Aune says. "The emphasis then was absolutely on the growth and development of the forest."

But it is the existence of any forest data at all that attracted many of the current band of scientists to Blacks Mountain, says Phil Weatherspoon, a Forest Service fire ecologist. The team's study of decaying logs, for example, relies on tree measurements taken at five-year intervals since the 1930s. "We have an absolutely unique opportunity because of those records. They let us relate the decomposition stage to how long the tree has been on the ground. There are very few places where we could do that."

For most of the scientists, working together is as unique as working with a half-century of data. Cooperation does not come naturally to researchers accustomed to answering their own professional questions in self-defined isolation. "It was a tug," says George Ferrell, a Forest Service research entomologist. "Different disciplines are not always in agreement over things like slash and forest openings. We all had to give a lot."

They began their teamwork in 1991 with a Herculean labor: three days together in a room without windows. Suspicious, competitive, testing their dominance, Harcksen says she wondered at first if they would all survive. "Scientists aren't used to making compromises. Those first three days were a real test of character."

Emerging unscathed and enlightened, the scientists devoted the next 18 months to further discussion before generating a formal plan to guide them and their successors. The seven-page single-spaced prospectus outlines a 50-year study that evaluates everything from genetic diversity to dirt. "We know what happens when we clear-cut. What we don't know is what happens in old-growth stands or what happens as these stands change," says William Laudenslayer Jr., a research wildlife biologist with the Blacks Mountain forest.

To find out, the scientists have divided 3,000 acres of the experimental forest into 12 250-acre study plots laid out on a 100-meter grid marked by small metal monuments. Here they will create two forest structures, one an old-growth type with trees of various species and heights, the other a more simple, even-aged type of forest. Plots of each type will then be grazed by cattle and treated with prescribed fire. Separate plots of each forest type will not be grazed or burned. To maintain a control, the scientists have also identified five 100-acre research natural areas where they will conduct no timber harvests, prescribed burns, or grazing. They have spread their individual experiments across all the various forest plots.