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Chapter Ten: Into the Canopy and Beyond
- Oregon State University Press
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{ 135 Chapter Ten Into the Canopy and Beyond { Once I’m up there, I never want to come down. —Nalini Nadkarni1 The late 20th century saw increasing involvement of the nation’s scientists in large-scale environmental studies. Perhaps none was bigger than the study of global climate change and the effect of greenhouse gases on the planet. The new era of science at Wind River would address these global questions at the very top of the forest. New restrictions within Late-Successional Reserves had made it difficult to continue experiments that involved cutting trees and stalled many of the silviculture experiments that were still planned for Trout Creek Hill. For scientists studying the ecology of old-growth forests, however, it seemed as if the sky was the limit. For most of the 20th century, old forests had been regarded by most forest managers as unproductive graveyards standing in the way of efficient timber production. Now protection of old-growth forests and their associated species was important to the goals of federal forest management. As forest scientists learned more about the structure and function of old forests, they found themselves exploring a new frontier that had long been beyond their reach: the forest canopy. For the first three-quarters of the 20th century, the leafy top of the forest had been out of reach and mostly out of mind. During that time, the forest canopy was thought of as something like a convertible top on a car: it was either open or closed. When the crowns of those trees grew together, the top was closed, and timber managers knew it was time to thin the stand to get more growth into the remaining wood-bearing trunks. 136 { Chapter Ten For generations forest scientists understood that most of the photosynthesis that fed tree growth occurred in the canopy, where sunlight hits the most exposed leaves. As they tested young trees at different spacings, they were in part testing the contribution of different sized crowns to developing wood. But in most studies that considered tree crowns or forest canopies, the treetops were measured from the ground, looking up, or the trees themselves were cut down and dissected into their various components and measured in pieces.2 That changed in the 1970s, when a handful of adventurous researchers at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest scrambled up into the forest canopy using mountain-climbing gear. Hammering bolts into tree trunks and hoisting themselves up with ropes, they discovered a new ecological frontier, coming eye-to-eye with unknown communities of lichens, insects, birds, and mammals at the very top of the forest.3 This work inspired canopy studies around the world, and soon researchers, particularly in the tropics, were scaling to new heights. As research interest grew, so did the inventive ways to get into the canopy. Researchers balanced platforms in the tree limbs, hung swinging rope bridges to go from tree to tree, and experimented with balloons to carry instruments skimming over the world’s forest rooftops. The Tarzan-like study of forest canopies grabbed popular attention. A story in a 1991 issue of National Geographic featured Nalini Nadkarni, a botany professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, exploring the Costa Rican forest canopy with her baby son, Gus, tucked into her backpack.4 In the 1980s the Smithsonian Institute installed a construction crane in the Panama rainforest, creating the world’s first canopy crane with continuous access to a cylinder of space in the tropical rainforest. Soon afterwards, Jerry Franklin and others began exploring the idea of bringing a canopy crane similar to the one in Panama to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. A canopy crane could be an important tool for science as well as a new source of economic development for a rural community dependent on dwindling supplies of federal timber. FranklinmentionedtheideatoLesAuCoin,thenaU.S.congressman from Oregon. He recalled, “AuCoin was really taken with the idea, and he was on the House Appropriations subcommittee that dealt [107.23.157.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:43 GMT) Into the Canopy and Beyond { 137 with forest research. The next thing I knew, a subcommittee staff person called me up and asked how much we needed to buy and install a canopy crane.”5 But finding a site for high-visibility forest research was not easy in the early 1990s. The timber wars had left raw feelings in many timber communities for forest research and anything that appeared...