Scott D. Bridgham

Oak Savanna Successional Dynamics and Restoration
           

A Landscape-Level Approach to Fuels Management Through Ecological Restoration: Developing a Knowledge Base for Application to Historic Oak-Pine Savanna, Joint Fire Science Program, $393,110, 5/04 – 7/08.

Principal Investigators:  Bart Johnson (University of Oregon), Scott Bridgham  (University of Oregon), Jane Kertis (U.S. Forest Service)

Ph.D. Students:  Gabe Yospin (Ph.D.)

M.S. Students:  Jonathan Day, Karen Sonnenblick, Meghan Murphy, Jenna Garmon, Adrienne Moll

           The objective of this project is to examine the potential for using restoration of oak savanna in the southern Willamette Valley to reduce the potential for catastrophic fires. The project involves examining landscape and local controls over different successional trajectories from oak savanna to various potential dense forest communities in sites from mid-elevation in the Cascades to Willamette Valley bottomlands.  There is also a large outreach component with local stakeholders in which we examined a variety of future alternative scenarios incorporating different components of oak savanna enhancement for plant and wildlife biodiversity, reduction of the risk for catastrophic fire, and economics. To date, this project has resulted in three M.S. theses in CEEB, Environmental Studies, and Geography. A fourth M.S. student has mostly completed her thesis in Landscape Architecture, and a second-year Ph.D. student, Gabe Yospin, is currently working on the project. The future direction of this project is to model the effects of oak savanna restoration on forest community and fire dynamics in the Willamette Valley over the next 100 years in the face of changing urban and rural human settlement patterns and climate change. To achieve this objective, we have built a collaboration with a number of U.S. Forest Service employees, including the well known modeler Dr. Ronald Nielson.

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