My Postdoctoral Research was done for the US Department of Agriculture in Burns, Oregon and worked on adaptive management of public lands.
My last position was with the USDA-ARS station in Burns, Oregon (known as EOARC or Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center) as a postdoctoral researcher. I finished up in August. My research emphasis was the development and execution of adaptive management strategies for local agencies. My main adaptive management project was at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is very large (185,000 acres or therabouts) and has problems with some invasive weeds. The big problem, at least in upland areas, is perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium) though there are other mustards and plenty of thistles causing trouble as well. In the wetter areas the management questions revolve around keeping the emergents (cattails and bulrushes) from expanding and filling in too much of the open water. The waterfowl seem to do best in areas with an interspersion of emergents and open water, and some areas of the Refuge are pretty solid stands of cattail or bulrush. Manipulating water - especially the timing and duration of flooding - is a big management tool. They also use some burning (usually in winter), some herbicide usage, mowing and haying, and a bit of winter cattle grazing. The challenge has been applying the management in a way that allows data collection and analysis of the effectiveness of the different treatments in a scientifically valid manner.
I started the experiment in April of 2005. Our plan was to manipulate flooding depth and duration, and have some smaller plots for testing the effects of burning and herbicide use within each combination of water manipulation treatments. However, since the water was at flood stage in the spring of 2005, we could not reduce water in any of the fields without risking flooding roads, so the first year's results were analyzed more as a soil water (GWC) by treatment response regression approach than any applied water treatment (the joys of field work!). In 2006, we once again couldn't control the water treatments, so I collected soil water data again. I was able to apply the herbicide spraying treatment. The winter 2005-2006 burn treatment, unfortunately, didn't happen since the fire crew was called off to fight the Texas fires during our burn window. So, during the two years I was working on the study, it was largely a test of how species diversity and emergent vegetation cover relates to soil water content and how herbicide application influences this relationship. The study has illustrated the limitations on applying controlled management treatments at the site, the need for flexibility in management designs, and the necessity for running management experiments over long time scales. Hopefully they will continue the study over a longer time scale and build on the preliminary data I collected.
On the office end, I spent a lot of time writing papers. My dissertation chapters are in print now. One is in Restoration Ecology, another is in Ecological Applications, and the third is in Grasslands. I've also written a few papers with my USDA colleagues. One is a synthesis paper on how to do Adaptive Management which is a Viewpoint paper in Rangeland Ecology and Management. The other is based on my analysis of some other peoples' unpublished data on seed islands and came out in the September 2005 issue of Ecological Restoration. I also wrote a nice article on adaptive management that the local paper printed. I also, in my spare time, helped to author a book chapter on water relations in California grasslands which should be available at the end of 2007 from University of California Press.
I kept up on my teaching and public outreach. I spent plenty of hours in small meetings to instruct folks on adaptive management and how it can be used. On a related note, I taught the Adaptive Management section of a workshop on "Ecologically-Based Invasive Weed Management" on April 4-7, 2005, which was a lot of fun. I taught a large group of second grade students the concepts of plant growth and soil nutrition in a hands-on workshop at EOARC's "Second Grade Field Trip" in both 2005 and 2006 as well.