Join us on April 7th for a stimulating conversation with three pre-eminent forest and watershed experts — Jerry Franklin, PhD, Julia Jones, PhD and Roger Bales, PhD — to discuss their work understanding how forests function as watersheds and the effects of forest management on that. As we grapple with increasing drought and water uncertainty, managing our forests to restore watershed function and promote water security becomes even more important.
Of all forest services, supplying us with plentiful clear, cool water is perhaps the most important and yet the least rewarded. And, history demonstrates that managing forests for timber as the primary goal has not been good for our water supplies. (In fact, the US Forest Service was formed specifically in response to the devastation of New England forest watersheds in the early 1900s.)
While some regulations have been put in place to help mitigate damage to watersheds and forest water services from management focused on timber products, it’s often less clear what we need to do to restore and maintain watershed functions of forests. This webinar will explore how forests regulate water flows naturally, what is not working well today in our western forests, what we can do to manage and maintain forests for their watershed services and how that relates to other forest functions.
More on Our Panelists:
Laurie A. Wayburn
Prior to co-founding Pacific Forest Trust in 1993, Ms. Wayburn worked internationally for 10 years in the United Nations Environment Program and Ecological Sciences Division of UNESCO. She later served as Executive Director of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory and was the Founder and first Coordinator of the Central California Coast Biosphere Reserve. Ms. Wayburn is a graduate of Harvard University and currently serves on the Northwest BioCarbon Initiative Steering Committee, the American Forest Policy Steering Committee, and the Land Trust Alliance Advisory Council.
Dr. Roger Bales
Dr. Bales is Distinguished Professor of Engineering and a founding faculty member at UC Merced, and has been active in water- and climate-related research for over 30 years. His scholarship includes over 160 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and more presentations, book chapters, and reports. Currently, his work focuses on California’s efforts to build the knowledge base and implement policies that adapt our water supplies, critical ecosystems and economy to the impacts of climate warming. He works with leaders in state agencies, elected officials, federal land managers, water leaders, non-governmental organizations, and other key decision makers on developing climate solutions for California. He is a fellow in the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a professor at UC Merced since 2003, an Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the UC Berkeley since 2013. Previously, he was a Professor of hydrology at the University of Arizona from 1984 to 2003. He has served as Director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, and the UC Water Security and Sustainability Research Initiative. He is currently co-director of the UC Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions.
Dr. Jerry F. Franklin
Dr. Franklin is a world-renowned forest ecologist who has been called “the father of new forestry.” He is a professor of ecosystem analysis in the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington. The only forest ecologist in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Franklin has received the Heinz Award for the Environment, the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America, the LaRoe Award from the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Pinchot Medallion from the Pinchot Institute for Conservation. A native of Oregon, Dr. Franklin received his B.S. and M.S. in Forest Management from Oregon State University and a Ph.D. in Botany and Soils from Washington State.
Dr. Julia Jones
Dr. Jones is Distinguished Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. She has studied forest management effects on flooding, water yield, low-flows, and rain-on-snow utilizing long-term data on streamflow, climate, and ecology from paired watershed experiments. Much of this work has taken place at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascade Mountains and watershed experiments in North and South America. She has worked closely with the U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored Long-term Ecological Research network. Dr. Jones has authored papers on forest hydrology, hydrology of road interactions with streams, water resources engineering, geomorphology, wood in streams, landscape disturbance, soils, plant invasions, biogeography, plant ecology, ecosystem water use, species distribution modeling, and climate change.