forestry

Two crown jewels in the heart of North Dakota have recently been announced as historic places tied to President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy.

The Elkhorn Ranch and Greater Elkhorn Ranchlands are now on the National Register of Historic places as a national historic district. President Roosevelt made the Elkhorn Ranch his home and explored, hunted and wrote about the Greater Elkhorn Ranchlands.

With wildfires that raged out of control this fire season, a year of “devastating conflagrations” seems to be the only way to describe such massive destruction on the nation’s forested lands. And scientists who know something about limiting the power of these forest infernos are needed more than ever.

Lucky for us, Terrie Benavidez Jain, a U.S. Forest Service scientist, has answers to help reduce the impacts of fire on forested lands. In fact, researching and studying the science of forest fires is something Jain has come to know quite well throughout her impressive career.

Nestled in the southwest corner of Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest sits a historic fort known today as Fort Gadsden—the only historic landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Region.

The fort served as a Native American trading post, a British fort, as U.S. Fort Gadsden, and as a Confederate fort during the Civil War. The fort was also used as a safe haven for runaway slaves travelling the Underground Railroad, which ran south to Spanish Florida prior to 1821.

The Olympic Experimental State Forest is the largest site in the U.S. Forest Service’s national network of experimental forests and it’s the only representative of the Olympic Peninsula’s temperate rain forest ecosystem, which is known for its extreme rainfall and growth rates.

Its large size, encompassing 270,000 acres, and history of innovation make this a forest that offers many opportunities for research and monitoring.

Fall is a wonderful time to find an amazing array of wildflowers on your national forests and grasslands. But before you venture out, take a moment for a sneak preview on the U.S. Forest Service’s Fall Colors web site for a few ideas to plan your visit

Early morning hikers who are out and about in the hardwood forests of the south-central and eastern United States may be lucky enough to observe the second flowering of dittany (Cunila origanoides). Also known as frost flowers, they are found in late autumn on crisp, frosty mornings. Though they are not true flowers, they are just as beautiful.

The Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) recently guided USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack through its unique set of research facilities. Basic and applied research at FPL supports a number of objectives, including forest management and restoration, the wise use of forest resources, job creation, and expanding economic opportunities through public-private partnerships on a national scale.

Throughout his tour, Secretary Vilsack talked with lab leadership about FPL’s diverse and innovative research efforts. Project leaders used the opportunity to field questions from the Secretary and explain work ranging from wood preservation and durability to advances in “green” building strategies and technology, use of beetle-killed trees, work on historic timber bridges, and advances in nanocellulose-related materials and applications.

Fabian Garcia, a U.S. Forest Service employee for eight years, intimately understands the connection between nature and nurture.

As a young Latino growing up in an agricultural community in central California, Garcia’s world revolved around the outdoors. When he, his parents and three siblings were not working, they were fishing in nearby lakes and streams, exploring giant sequoias that towered over forests or traveled just to play in the snow.

Today, Garcia, who is now 31, works with high school students in Los Angeles as director of the Southern California Consortium – the Forest Service conduit that helps young people connect to nature.  His job has helped him to understand how his childhood connection to nature gave him peace of mind and eagerly shares his experiences with others.

Mineral Community Hospital in Superior, Montana received an $190,000 Woody Biomass Utilization Grant from the U.S. Forest Service.  The new Mineral Hospital Biomass Generator will use woody material such as beetle-killed trees removed from forests to help prevent wildfires.  The material will then be processed in bioenergy facilities to produce green energy for heating and electricity.

When Dave Nowak of the U.S. Forest Service and Scott Maco of Davey Tree Expert Company began collaborating on the creation of a suite of urban forest analysis tools called i-Tree, they imagined that users would be mostly city foresters from the  United States.

Six years later, the U.S. Forest Service is releasing i-Tree version 5.0 with changes inspired by users from 105 countries. Version 5.0 is upgraded to rapidly assess urban trees and forests throughout Canada and Australia, two of the countries leading i-Tree’s international expansion.

“It’s neat to see how this program has grown,” Nowak said. “We didn’t expect this kind of response, but the i-Tree partnership has done an outstanding job in reaching potential users.”

It was about 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 12, in Onia, a small community in Stone County, Arkansas, within the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest. About 24 hours had passed since three-year-old Landen Cade Trammell had wandered away from his home and about 30 Forest Service employees were actively searching for the little boy.