FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT NEWS A Newsletter for Department of Forest Ecology and Management Staff, Students, and Alumni

Vol. 2, No. 2 September, 1999

News fromthe Chair

It hardly seems like a year has elapsedsince I became chair of the department. Ithought that I had a pretty good idea ofwhat being chair involved, but thelearning curve is pretty steep the firstyear. Fortunately, former chair RonGiese hasn't yet gotten to the point ofkicking me out of his office on thoseoccasions when I go to him for advice! I haven't been the only one goingthrough a learning experience, though. Itwas just a bit more than a year ago thatDr. Elton Aberle joined us as Dean of theCollege of Agricultural and LifeSciences, and there are several new facesamong his associate deans. Speaking of new faces, we hope tohave some in the coming year. It is anexciting time but also a busy one. Weare currently looking for someone in thearea of Extension Forest Management,and will soon begin the search process tofill the Extension Wood Products and theForest Biometry positions. The hiring ofnew faculty is one of the most importantdecisions a department can make becauseit helps set the direction we take formany years to come. If you know ofsomeone you think would be a goodcandidate for any of these three positions,please encourage him or her to apply orcontact me for further information. One advantage that I have gained aschair is the ability to see more com-pletely the nature of our programs andpeople. I am impressed with the qualityof the students and faculty. I hope thatyou will take the time to read about themin the remainder of the newsletter. A few weeks ago, a member of the department's first graduating class stopped

by to say hello. I really enjoyed visitingwith him and appreciated his taking thetime. If your travels bring you toMadison, please do stop in and visit. And if you are attending the Society ofAmerican Foresters (SAF) meeting inPortland, Sept. 11-15, don't miss ouralumni reception. - Jeff Stier

AlumniUpdate

Alumni Reception at the SAFMeeting in Portland

The department will be hosting its secondannual alumni reception Sunday night,September 12, at the Society of AmericanForesters (SAF) national meeting inPortland, OR. You are invited to stop byand partake of the food and libationswhile receiving an update on departmentalactivities, meeting old friends andreminiscing about "the good old days." We would like to make this an annualevent so you can count on it when youare able to attend a national SAFmeeting.

StudentNews

FEM has talented runnersin its ranks

Students don't spend all of their timestudying; some manage to take time outfor a refreshing bit of exercise. Consider,for example, graduate students LisaSchulte and Alejandro Muñoz. OnSaturday, May 8, they ran in the Ultra-

Marathon National Championship at the Ice Age Park near Whitewater, WI. Lisa ran 50 km. (31 miles) of forest trail andfinished second in her category with atime of 5 hours, 36 minutes. Alejandroran 80 km. (50 miles) and finishedseventh in his category, recording a timeof 7 hours and 58 minutes. Rumor has itthat they did rest on Sunday!

UW-Madison team earnsMidwest Capstone ReportAward

Many U.S. forestry schools now havesenior capstone courses that involve teamprojects. Capstone courses requirestudents to integrate knowledge fromcourses throughout the curriculum and tosynthesize their knowledge in order tosolve a complex land or resourcemanagement problem. In 1997Professors Jeff Stier and alumnus BlairOrr (MI Tech) initiated the UpperMidwest Capstone Report Awards as away to introduce some friendlycompetition among the schools andrecognize those teams that did a superiorjob with their projects. Iowa StateUniversity, Michigan State University,Michigan Technological University, andthe University of Wisconsin-Madison

In this issue

Alumni update . . . . . . . . . . 1

FEM students win the crow . . 2

FEM faculty awards . . . . . . . 2

Meet Scott Mackay . . . . . . . 3

Wengert pedals coast to coast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

“Rec” program growing . . . . 5

Patrick Moore lecture . . . . . . 5

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each submit their top two capstonereports to a panel of seven judges who represent the forest industry firms thatsponsor the awards, state and federalforestry agencies and the universities. The reports are evaluated on the basis ofquality of writing, ease of comprehensionby the educated layperson, technical rigorand sense of land stewardship. The 1998-99 UW-Madison team ofBenji Brye, Jessica Lengling, EtsukoNonaka and Josh Scherer placed second inthe competition and divided the $250prize. They developed a managementplan for a 457-acre property in DaneCounty owned by Swamplovers, Inc. The four corporate shareholders haddifferent interests, so the team had tostruggle with trying to provide a balancedmanagement plan and also determine howto improve the degraded woodland thatcharacterized some of the property. Funding for the 1998-99 awards wasprovided by Lake Superior Land, CalumetMI; Menominee Tribal Enterprises,Neopit, WI; Tenneco PackagingCompany, Tomahawk, WI; and theDepartment of Forest Ecology andManagement, UW-Madison.

FEM takes the crow

In May the Forestry Club took on theWildlife Ecology Club in a friendly gameof softball. The competition got seriously competitive pretty quickly! We won't reveal the details of the final score

Forestry club students below celebrate their victory over the Wildlife Ecology Club. Pictured left to right: 1st row-Cindy Karsten, Brooke Ivener, Kris Tiles, JohnStephenson, Alan Kirshbaum, Sunday Burkart and Karl Welch. 2nd row-TheranStatz, Jedd Ungrodt, Benji Brye and Anne Hussa.

to protect the reputations of the losers,but we can tell you that the ForestryClub won handily. The winning team isshown in the photo below, along withthe traveling trophy supplied by theWildlife Club – a well-camouflagedmounted crow perched on a stump!

Travel troubles

On July 25 a group of Professor DavidMladenoff's graduate students leftMadison in the department's minivan forSnowmass Village, Colorado, to attendthe Fifth World Congress of theInternational Association of LandscapeEcology. In Iowa the vehicle gave themreason to question whether they wouldmake it to Colorado, or at least in time toattend the meeting. Fortunately, theywere able to replace a failing fuel filterand complete the trip. The meeting was agreat success.

The story doesn't end there, however. Upon arriving back in Madison, one ofthe students took the van through the carwash and it stalled again. This time itrequired a new fuel pump. The goodnews is that they made it back toMadison before the fuel pump failed; thebad news is that replacing a fuel pumpis not a trivial repair. Thank goodnessthe department has a new minivan onorder!

FacultyBulletin

Guries to receive SchenckTeaching Award

The Society of American Foresters (SAF)will present Professor Ray Guries withthe Schenck Teaching Award at thenational awards assembly Mondaymorning, September 13, at the SAFannual meeting in Portland, OR. Department Chair Jeff Stier reported thatthe impetus for nominating Ray camefrom a group of former students whocontacted the department and asked ifthere was something they could do torecognize Ray for all he has done forstudents. While Ray has taught anumber of courses in the curriculum overthe years, quite a few of his interactionswith students have occurred outside theclassroom; e. g., on firewood cuttingprojects at the Dells, during the annualChristmas tree sale, at summer camp, onthe spring trip, or at one of the manybarbecues at the "Guries Farm." TheSchenck Award is a fitting recognition ofRay's many efforts to educate the totalstudent, both inside and outside theclassroom. He joins Professor JosephBuongiorno who was SAF's very firstSchenck Award winner.

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Three FEM faculty honoredwith CALS awards

The College of Agricultural and LifeSciences (CALS) presented Professor EricKruger with the 1999 Jung Excellence inTeaching Award at the Gamma SigmaDelta (GSD) spring banquet. GSD is thehonorary agricultural fraternity. Professor David Mladenoff received thePound Research Award for his work inlandscape ecology and Professor KenRaffa (Entomology and Forest Ecologyand Management) received the SpitzeLand Grant Award. Congratulations toall three.

John Bruce takes positionwith World Bank

Professor John Bruce will be leaving thedepartment temporarily at the end ofAugust. He is taking a half-timeappointment with the World Bank andwill be stationed in Washington, D.C. He will also retain a half-timeappointment with the UW Land TenureCenter. John's area of expertise is naturalresource law and tenure. Coincidentally,on July 1 Dr. Peter Bloch joined thedepartment in a half-time capacity. Peter's area is natural resourcedevelopment.

Meet Professor Scott Mackay

My primary area ofresearch is watershedhydrology, whichmeans I aminterested in thestructure, function,and dynamics ofwatershed systems.By structure I meanthe morphology ofthe watershed, its

hydrologic flow pathways, soils, andvegetation. By function I refer to theinteractions between flow pathways,soils, and growing vegetation, anddynamics refers to the long-term changesin watershed structure or function that

result from land use and land coverchanges. Much of our understanding ofthese aspects of watersheds comes fromfield studies conducted in relatively smallareas, but many important applications ofwatershed hydrology address very largeareas. The emerging fields of GeographicInformation Science and Remote Sensingare helping to bridge this gap, as aredevelopments in computer simulationmodeling. There remains much to belearned about how to integrate carefulexperimental work to computer models ofwhole watersheds, and how to managecomputer models so that they can becarefully evaluated before being used tohelp answer natural resource questions.Within this context my research has twoprimary themes. The first is developmentand validation of models of hydrologicalprocesses over large areas. This work isdirected primarily at improving ourunderstanding of watershed systems. Thesecond focus area of my research is themanagement of large, integratedsimulation models, which is directedmore at improving our understanding ofhow to represent and manage hydrologicalinformation. This interplay of earthsciences with computer sciences beganearly in my undergraduate training. I was born in Toronto, Ontario,Canada and grew up in a rural areanorthwest of Toronto. I spent manysummers outdoors in central Ontario, ascenic region with a high density of lakesand mixed forest on the Canadian Shield.Here I learned to appreciate naturalsystems and the effects of humanactivities on them. I did my undergraduateand graduate studies at the University ofToronto. My undergraduate training wasprimarily in Geomorphology andClimatology, which I combined withComputer Science. My Master’s thesiscombined geomorphology and artificialintelligence to automate the identificationof glacial features on digital terrain data.This work demonstrated the importance ofspatial reasoning in computerrepresentations of natural systems. It alsoconvinced me of the inherent limitationsof computer models.

My Doctoral work focused onproblems of representation and modelingof long-term water fluxes in large,forested watersheds. This work wasfunded by the Canadian Governmentthrough the Natural Science andEngineering Research Councilscholarship program, and a highlycompetitive Tri-Council EcoResearchDoctoral Fellowship. I completed mydissertation in 1997. Results from thiswork and subsequent research atUW-Madison have been published in anumber of peer-reviewed hydrology andcomputer sciences journals. My research program at UW-Madisonnow has five graduate students, one ofwhom has recently graduated, and onepostdoctoral researcher. My projectsinclude regionalization of long-term waterbalance in forested watersheds,aggregation effects in nonpoint sourcepollution models, and long-term waterflux changes in northern Wisconsin.These projects are or have been funded bythe UW Graduate School,McIntire-Stennis, Wisconsin Departmentof Natural Resources, and a recentlyawarded NASA Land Surface Hydrologyprogram research grant. In my first yearat UW-Madison I was awarded a NASACenters of Excellence in Remote Sensingto construct a unique network-basedcomputer “superlab” for geo-spatialresearch and instruction. This has resultedin a significant boost in computernetwork performance within ForestEcology and Management, theEnvironmental Remote Sensing Center,Soil Science and several other naturalresources related computing centers oncampus. It has also significantlyimproved the geo-spatial computingresources at UW-Madison. I regularly teach three courses in GIS,remote sensing, and hydrology. MyRegional Hydrology course introducesstudents to the hydrologic cycle with anemphasis on forested environments at aregional extent. I teach an advancedcourse in Geographic InformationScience, which covers theoretical aspectsof information technology applied togeo-spatial problems. Finally, I teach a

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course in remote sensing visualinterpretation, which combines the artand science of aerial photographic anddigital image interpretation withstate-of-the-art technology.

Wengert pedals coast to coast

Emeritus Professor Gene Wengert foundsomething a little different to do in hisretirement. He reports that on his 56thbirthday, in preparation for hisretirement, he purchased a new bicycle. A test run down the Mississippi River(St. Paul to St. Louis in 9 days) inSeptember, 1998 convinced him that hewas ready for a really BIG trip – coast tocoast, across the USA – in 1999. This isa dream that he had been nurturing since1974. On June 6, he and 60 other riders,including many who were older thanGene, dipped their rear wheel in thePacific Ocean and took off from SanFrancisco. Fifty-two days and 3,791miles later, he arrived in Portsmouth, NHwhere he dipped his front wheel in theAtlantic Ocean. Although there weremoments with second thoughts early inthe trip, Gene is thrilled and proud athaving made the trip. He states that theride was FANTASTIC and describes itthis way: The route started at the beach justunder the Golden Gate Bridge. Weproceeded toward Sacramento, through theplacer gold mining areas, up Mount Rose(the highest year-round pass in theSierra's), across Donner Pass and into

Reno. Then across thedry country followingthe old wagon trailthrough Nevada'sdesert, across the SaltFlats, and into SaltLake City (11 days and812 miles) for a day ofrest. Then acrossSouthern Colorado,past Royal Gorge, andover the Rockies at11,312 foot highMonarch Pass, intoPueblo, CO for anotherrest day. Next, easternColorado, then Kansas(where one

Gene Wengert takes a breather after climbing 11,312 ft.Monarch Pass in the Rocky Mountains.

"ScenicOverlook" was a view of a huge cattle feed lot; odoriferous!), past the halfway point in the middle ofKansas, and finally into St. Joseph, MO(after 29 days) for the 4th of July andanother rest day. After some rolling hillsin Missouri with lots of trees instead ofwheat fields, we crossed into flat Illinoisand Indiana, went past corn fields with 8-foot high corn on July 11 and millions ofbean fields, and into Indianapolis (38thday and almost 3/4 of the way!) restingagain. The route angled up into NE Ohiopast more farming country; one day wehad about 1000 hills to climb! Finallythe cool breezes off of Lake Eriewelcomed us to Erie, PA (day 43) for ourfinal rest day. Then up into New York,past vineyards, museums, Woodstock II,over the Berkshires (2nd biggest climbingday), into beautiful wooded northernMassachusetts, and finally to the Atlantic

The series of postcard maps below plot the progress of Gene Wengert’s coast to coast bicycle trip this summer.

Ocean in Portsmouth, NH and theceremonial wheel dipping. Gene explainsthat the experience of seeing, smelling,touching, and hearing the USA from abicycle seat was fantastic. Physically, itwas easier than he expected and he wasable to finish each day by 3 p.m. orearlier. Mentally, the idea of getting up at5 a.m. and sitting on a little piece ofleather and cranking at 85 rpm's for fiveor six hours was hard to adjust to, but thefellow bikers, local citizens, history,sights, smells, and sounds easily kepthim going. For those of you who might bethinking about duplicating Gene'sexperience, here are a few descriptivestatistics: They had no rain the entireroute and only five days were cloudy. The hottest temperature was 95 F, but

FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT NEWS Page 5

mostly the high temperatures were in the70s and 80s. Surprisingly, headwinds(east to west) predominated. Gene's bikeperformed perfectly and required norepairs, although he did have five flats(one in NV and four in NY) and wore outone rear tire. He averaged 13.8 mph and81 miles per day. One memorable day hecovered 100 miles in 5 hours and 38minutes! He calculates that his peddleswent around 1,397,400 times! His peakspeed was 47 mph coming downMonarch Pass in Colorado; he could havegone faster but he caught up to somecars. The most climbing he did in oneday was 8,590 feet; the total climb was129,030 feet. The photo on the previouspage shows Gene at Monarch Pass in theContinental Divide. Gene reports that,contrary to popular myth, it wasn't alldownhill from there!

DepartmentNews

Interest grows for RecreationResources Managementmajor

For years the department offered a majorin Recreation Resources Management(RRM). The Departments of LandscapeArchitecture and Continuing andVocational Education also offered themajor. The curriculum and careerorientation of each department's majorhad a different emphasis. Several yearsago, the departments stopped admittingstudents into the major in order to take acomprehensive look at what it should be.The Department of Forest Ecology andManagement revitalized the curriculumand focused it into one major thatemphasizes natural resource-based recreation management. In the fall of1998 four students entered the new major and by spring enrollment had grown to14. Numbers for this fall weren't knownwhen the newsletter went to press, but

the revised major seems to be attractingstudents. Job prospects appear to begood, the RRM curriculum nicelycomplements that for the Forest Sciencemajor, and some students complete bothmajors to get a richer education andfurther enhance their employmentopportunities.

Patrick Moore Delivers the1999 Hamilton RoddisMemorial Lecture

In May, Dr. Patrick Moore of Vancouver,British Columbia, traveled to Wisconsinto give the eighth Hamilton RoddisMemorial Lecture. Actually, hepresented the lecture twice: once inRhinelander and once in Madison. Dr.Moore's lecture was entitled "PacificSpirit-The Forest Reborn," which alsohappens to be the title of his popularbook on forestry in the PacificNorthwest. Dr. Moore is a controversialspeaker in the forestry field, and he has his critics, but he provided some thought-provoking comments and discussion. Some of the most interesting exchanges

Pictured with Hamilton-Roddis speaker Dr. Patrick Moore(center ) are Dr. Elton Eberle (CALS Dean) on Moore’s leftand Jeff Stier (FEM Chair) on his right.

came during a radio broadcast whencallers questioned and challenged him. If you would like a copy of Dr.

Moore's lecture, please contact thedepartment and we will mail one to you. The Roddis Lectures are supported by theHamilton Roddis Foundation, whichhonors Mr. Roddis, a prominentWisconsin forestry entrepreneur.

We’d like to hear from you

We’d like to encourage you to drop usa note with news you would like us toinclude in the FEM newsletter. Thisincludes what alumni are doing sincegetting their degrees, announcementsthat the department faculty andstaff would be interested in, noticesof upcoming meetings, andsuggestions for newsletter topics. This information can be sent to: JeffStier, Forest Ecology andManagement, 1630 Linden Drive,University of Wisconsin-Madison,Madison, WI 53706. Or send an e-mail to: jcstier@facstaff.wisc.edu

On the lighter side

Not looking forward to all the hypethat goes with a national election? There is at least one up side – some

candidates providesome pretty goodcomedy. Considerthe following quotesfrom famouspoliticians thatfall into thecategory of “Thingsbetter left unsaid!”

“The president haskept all of thepromises heintended to keep.” -Clinton aide GeorgeStephanopolousspeaking on “LarryKing Live”

“The Internet is agreat way to get on

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the Net.” - Republican candidateBob Dole

“Outside of the killings,Washington has one of the lowestcrime rates in the country.” - MayorMarion Barry, Washington, D.C.

“I haven’t committed a crime. WhatI did was fail to comply with thelaw.” - David Dinkins, New YorkCity Mayor, answering accusationsthat he failed to pay his taxes.

“I was recently on a tour of LatinAmerica and the only regret I havewas that I didn’t study Latin harderin school so I could converse withthose people.” - Former U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle

“Things are more like they are nowthan they ever were before.” -Former U.S. President Dwight D.Eisenhower.

Department of Forest Ecology and Management1630 Linden Drive, Room 120University of Wisconsin-MadisonMadison, WI 53706

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FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT NEWSProduction/Design: Mary Miron

FEM News is published by the Department of Forest Ecology and Management 1630 Linden Drive, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI 53706.

Tel. (608) 262-9975 • Fax (608) 262-9922 E-mail (chair): jcstier@facstaff.wisc.edu • Web site: http://forest.wisc.edu/

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