A world of research & creativity at Oregon State University • Fall 2010
Countdown on the Columbia
The river that turned darkness to dawn
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
A Feeling for Family
Animation inspired by generations
Nature’s Medicine Chest
Promising new drugs from black water
Stones on Ice
Climate clues from Greenland
Features
6
A World Apart
“Cervical cancer is so preventable when detected early.
But in our culture, women don't talk about issues like
these — issues that are so personal, so private."
Volume 6 Number 1 // oregonstate.edu/terra // Fall 2010
8
Nature’s Medicine Chest
Taifo Mahmud opens the incubator and, picking up
the stacked petri dishes one by one, raises them to
the light.
10
14
Countdown on the Columbia
The United States and Canada ratified the Columbia
River Treaty in 1964. It has governed hydropower and
flood control for almost 50 years and is coming up for
renewal. Now we know more.
A Feeling for Family
When Shelley Jordon was a little girl growing up in
Brooklyn, she got in trouble for pulling her mother’s
books off the shelves and drawing in the white spaces.
20
24
DEPARTMENTS
3 T E R R A BY T E S
What They’re Doing Now
Physics in the Round
Nanotech Lab Expands
Contraception Takes Two
TerraByte Lite: Far Side Entomology
4
S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H Preparing for the Future
DIRT Camp
5
F O OT P R I N T S Tracking Research Impact
Seismic Safety
EW TERRAIN
26 NLinking
Climate Sciences and Society
Science on the Horizon
Neil Shay to Lead OSU’s Wine Institute
Spinoffs Boost Oregon’s Economy
The Greening of Wood Products
R S P EC T I V E S Resea rch- B ased O p i n i o n
28 PAEWay
Forward for Oregon’s O&C Forests
LSO IN THIS ISSUE
29 AFarming
on the Fringe
Persistence of Species
Concerned with widespread reports of declines in
bird populations, Matt Betts is developing new ways
to analyze trends in biodiversity.
Stones on Ice
If all the water locked in the massive Greenland Ice
Sheet flowed into the oceans, low-lying coastal cities
worldwide would be inundated.
Located on the upper
Columbia River, the Revelstoke
Dam forms a reservoir
stretching for nearly 80 miles.
It is a concrete hydroelectric
gravity dam with an installed
capacity of 1.8 million
kilowatts and is owned and
operated by British Columbia
Hydro. See “Countdown on the
Columbia,” Page 12. Image by
© Christopher Morris/Corbis
Member University Research
Magazine Association
FALL 2010 » TERRA
1
TERRABYTES // What They’re Doing Now
President
Edward Ray
Physics in the Round
Interim Vice President for
University Advancement
Todd Simmons
Vice President for Research
Richard Spinrad
Editor
Nicolas Houtman
Research writer
Lee Sherman
Contributing writers
Aimee Brown, Angela Yeager
Design
Santiago Uceda
Photography
Matt Betts, Lynn Ketchum,
Patrick Leavitt, Karl Maasdam,
Jan Sonnenmair, Danielle White
Illustration
Elizabeth Meyer, Alex Nabaum, Gavin
Potenza, Santiago Uceda
OSU is a leading public research university with more than $275 million in
research funding in FY2010. Classified
by the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching in its top
category (very high research activity), OSU is one of only two American
universities to hold the Land-, Sea-,
Sun- and Space-Grant designations.
OSU comprises 11 academic colleges
with strengths in Earth systems,
health, entrepreneurship and the arts
and sciences.
Terra is published three times per
year by University Advancement
with support from the Oregon State
University Foundation. It is printed
with vegetable-based inks on paper
with 50% recycled content.
Contact Nicolas Houtman at:
nick.houtman@oregonstate.edu
402 Kerr Administration Building
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
541.737.0783
On the cover
Illustration by Alex Nabaum
Follow Terra on Facebook and Twitter
Talking about water
Lest we forget that environmental and human health are intimately connected,
the Gulf of Mexico oil spill delivered that message in spades. Dead birds and sea
turtles were the poster animals for an event that closed fisheries and elevated
health risks from volatile oil-based compounds in the air and water. Oregon State
University researchers are working there with colleagues on marine mammals,
fish and airborne toxins. A lot is riding on the results of these and other studies
(not the least of which is settlement of costs), but as Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Wallace Stegner wrote, “Verifiable knowledge makes its way slowly and only under
cultivation . . . .”
Since three-quarters of the Columbia’s water comes from the Canadian Rockies,
managing the river has been a shared responsibility between the United States and
Canada. The 1964 treaty that defines that international relationship could come up
for reconsideration as early as 2014. Our cover story describes what’s at stake and
OSU’s role in laying the groundwork for future negotiations.
Terra is entering its sixth year of publication, and we are marking this milestone
with a makeover, both in print and online. The magazine has more room for photos
and other art and two new departments, TerraBytes and Perspectives, bringing
you updates on stories you may have read in past issues and opinions from OSU
researchers. Online, you’ll find a portal to OSU’s research community with stories,
upcoming events, news, faculty and student blogs, videos and other multimedia. We
hope you find them enjoyable and engaging. Please visit us at oregonstate.edu/terra.
twitter.com/terraOSU
Nick Houtman, Editor
TERRA » FALL 2010
[TerraByte Lite]
Smart Bugs
Stegner was writing about the American West and the outlandish promises made
to lure Easterners to the plains in the 19th century. The bait: rich soils, an ideal
climate, a never-ending bounty of food. While the Good Life went bust for many,
the Pacific Northwest was blessed with rivers that could deliver myriad benefits.
The Columbia and its tributaries have been a source of sustenance for millennia.
The dams and reservoirs built over the last 75 years have turned America’s fourth
largest river into an industrial engine that powers cities, irrigates farmland and
serves as food source, playground and highway. To Stegner, the cost was too high.
The wild river, he wrote, had been reduced to “tamely turning turbines.”
facebook.com/terraOSU
2
No more sit and listen. Upper-level physics students at OSU work in teams, sharing
ideas and demonstrating what they learn. (See “Thinking Like a Physicist,” Terra, Spring
2008)
Now they can walk into a new classroom that fits this active learning style. Instead
of chairs facing forward, they find round tables to promote interaction. Instead of black
boards at the front of the room, they find touch screens on nearby walls.
Unique in Oregon, the new room is modeled after SCALE-UP (Student-Centered Active
Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs) at North Carolina State University.
“It promotes the goal of thinking about reasoning rather than trying to match a textbook
answer,” says Dedra Demaree, assistant professor of physics. “It puts students in charge
of generating the solutions.”
Nanotech Lab
Expands
The Microproducts Breakthrough
Institute (MBI), a partnership between
OSU and the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, has completed a major capital
construction project to enhance work in
technologies from hydrogen storage to
nanoparticle mixing.
MBI researchers focus on micro- and
nanotechnologies in fields such as energy
systems, heat and mass transfer, microreactors and nanoparticle synthesis. (See
“Small Miracles,” Terra, Winter 2007)
“We have a very collaborative atmosphere in the MBI where technology in the
micro and nano areas are developed and
commercialized. This translates to jobs for
Oregon and the Pacific Northwest,” says
Richard Peterson, co-director of the institute and a professor in the OSU School of
Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing
Engineering.
When the editors of Playboy magazine announce the best college course in the
country, you might expect them to choose classes in the visual arts. And so they did,
but the subject matter might surprise you. The winner is a course that uses cartoons to
stimulate thinking about insects.
OSU emeritus professor Michael Burgett has taught “Far Side Entomology” to University Honors College students since the mid-1980s. Playboy follows the Chronicle of
Higher Education and National Public Radio in singling out the farsighted course for its
combination of humor and learning.
“These cartoons speak to science and society in the language of humor that everyone
understands,” says Burgett.
Contraception Takes Two
In birth control decisions, both
partners count. A new study of young
women and their sexual partners concludes that they were more than twice
as likely to use contraception consistently when their male partners were
“very” in favor of birth control.
Marie Harvey, OSU professor of public
health, led the study of 435 couples in
East Los Angeles and in Oklahoma City.
Published in the journal Women’s Health
Issues, the study sheds more light on
the bundle of contradictions involved
with contraception use and sexual behavior. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided funding.
“We are trying to better understand the influence of partners in the sexual dynamic,”
Harvey says. “Public health research in the past has largely focused on the woman alone,
but we know that these kinds of decisions are not made in a vacuum and that a woman’s
sexual partner can be very influential.” (See “Sexual Health: Asking the Tough Questions,” Terra, Spring 2006).
FALL 2010 » TERRA
3
STUDENT RESEARCH // Preparing for the future
Tracking Research Impact // FOOTPRINTS
DIRT Camp
Student earns a paycheck on
the way to a degree
Seismic Safety
BY NICK HOUTMAN
All Scott Sell wanted to do was to
prove Richard Mikula wrong. “He was one
of those teachers who makes you want to
learn. He was tough,” says the Oregon State
University senior from Ashland, Oregon.
In his drive to show a thing or two to
his former high school chemistry teacher,
Sell has become a key player in a longterm environmental research project at
one of the nation’s premier ecological
research sites, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades.
In high school, the avid camper
and rock climber preferred searching
for toeholds on a vertical rock face to
cracking the books. He got C’s in Mikula’s
class but did well — scoring a 4 on a scale
of 1 to 5 — on the Advanced Placement
4
TERRA » FALL 2010
Scott Sell spent his 2010 spring break at Red
Rocks, Nevada, one of his favorite climbing
spots. (Photo: Patrick Leavitt)
chemistry test. Sell heard from a friend
that Mikula was surprised.
At OSU, he traded his climbing ropes
for lab notebooks, majoring in advanced
chemistry, running experiments and
analyzing results. He lasted about a year
and a half. After an instructor told him
that his academic program wouldn’t ever
allow for much outdoor exploration, he
switched to environmental chemistry.
Sell comes from an active and competitive family (younger brother Tyler is a
nationally ranked rower) and was looking
for opportunities to combine chemistry
with environmental issues. In an internship search, he just happened to walk
into Kate Lajtha’s office in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology.
Lajtha, a botanist who focuses on
soils and vegetation, leads a project with
a name that is true to her calling: DIRT
(Detrital Input and Removal Treatments).
The real dirt is where much of the action
happens in a forest. Carbon, nitrogen
and other chemicals cycle through forest
soils, she says, in a dynamic process that
she calls “a nightmare of variability.” DIRT
focuses on what controls those cycles
and particularly how disturbance — tree
harvesting and plant growth — affect the
stability of carbon in the soil. The results
could apply to efforts to sequester more
carbon in forest soils across the world.
Through Lajtha’s lab, Sell learned
how to analyze soil samples for major
elements and micronutrients. He maintained databases, developed statistics
and assisted graduate students. He
learned, in short, to take ownership of the
scientific process. He will be a co-author
on scientific papers (still in preparation),
which will help pave his way to graduate
school.
Last summer, he completed his senior
year working as a research assistant
at the Andrews Forest. He managed a
sophisticated new device (cavity ringdown laser spectrometer) that automatically analyzes air samples for isotopes
of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Last
winter, when it stopped working, Sell
contacted the manufacturer, made
repairs and conducted weekly tests.
“The work is self-directed,” he says. “I
love that I get out to the Andrews. I get
to spend all this time out in the forest. It’s
beautiful and serene and quiet.”
Sell hopes to apply his knowledge
by teaching chemistry or working for a
company or government agency cleaning
up pollution at oil spill and Superfund
sites. That, he says, would indeed make
Richard Mikula proud.
In an earthquake, Tom Miller knows which buildings to avoid. When the
shaking starts, you won’t find him standing next to an unreinforced masonry
(brick) structure. The Oregon State University engineering professor’s 2006
survey of 1,075 public buildings in Western Oregon ranked them among the most
likely to collapse.
To evaluate buildings for seismic risk, Miller led a student and faculty team
(OSU, Portland State and the University of Oregon) that followed guidelines
from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA 154). During their field
survey, they looked for design features that create “falling hazards” or that
predispose a building to major damage.
Funded by the state’s go-to agency for seismic safety, the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), the study paved the way for
additional engineering analyses and the state Legislature’s $30 million investment in renovations to schools, fire stations and hospitals in 2009. At OSU, Miller
teaches courses in structural analysis and design.
“Professor Miller was a superstar in his significant contributions to the 2007
DOGAMI report,” says Yumei Wang, geohazards team leader for the agency.
Miller received the 2010 Government Engineer of the Year award from the
Oregon section of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
1
Falling hazards such as parapets,
unreinforced masonry chimneys and
ornaments that are not adequately
anchored. One telltale sign on brick
walls: repeated brick layers placed with
the narrow ends facing the outside of
the wall. Spaced vertically every sixth
or seventh row, such layers connect
interior and exterior bricks that can
peel away from the structure in an
earthquake.
2
Building designs that do not follow
a simple rectangular shape. Such irregularities include L-shaped, T-shaped, and
U-shaped variations. In an earthquake,
each part of the building moves independently, and areas where sections join
tend to concentrate stresses. As a result,
they can crack and separate.
3
Vertical irregularities where a
building becomes narrower as it rises.
Seismic shaking produces different
stresses in each vertical section.
4
Buildings with large unreinforced
openings such as glass storefronts or
garage door openings for trucks. Such
walls can twist and threaten the integrity
of the entire structure.
5
The seismic survey report is
available online at oregongeology.org/
sub/projects/rvs/default.htm.
1
2
3
4
(Illustration by Liz Meyer)
FALL 2010 » TERRA
5
A World Apart
Researchers explore barriers
to health screening in Oregon’s
Hmong community
By Lee Sherman | Photo by Jan Sonnenmair
“It's not enough to provide written information
for people," Kue insists. "In our community,
communication is word of mouth. You have to
have that personal connection.”
J
ennifer Kue was just a little
girl when she began assisting
Portland's Hmong community. Learning English was a snap
for this child of Hmong immigrants
(Hmong are native to Southeast
Asia), so helping her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles navigate
American society — translating and
interpreting, making phone calls,
setting up appointments — was a role
she fell into naturally.
Over the years, the Ph.D. student
in OSU's Department of Public
Health has turned her informal
advocacy into a professional calling.
“I knew I wanted to work with
immigrants and refugees because of
the struggles and challenges my own
family went through,” Kue explains. “I
knew I was in a unique position to help
newcomer communities — to help
them establish their lives in the U.S.
more easily than my parents did.”
Health Screens
Born in Laos, Jennifer
Kue is using her work in
Portland’s Asian Family
Center to improve the
health of the Hmong
community.
6
TERRA » FALL 2010
Toward that end, Kue is working with
Professor Sheryl Thorburn and with
research assistants and OSU graduates Karen Levy Keon and Patela
Lo to understand the barriers that
prevent Hmong women from seeking
breast and cervical cancer screenings.
With Thorburn as principal investigator, the team is exploring factors
that may explain the extraordinary
rates of cervical cancer mortality
in this ethnic group from Southeast Asia (three to four times higher
than among the broader population of Asians, Pacific Islanders and
non-Hispanic white women), as
well as their low rates of preventive
mammography and Pap tests. Kue is
co-investigator and project coordi-
nator of the study that was funded by
the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Lo's participation is funded by NCI
through the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act.
“Cervical cancer is so preventable
when detected early,” Kue laments.
“But in our culture, women don't
talk about issues like these — issues
that are so personal, so private.”
About 80 women and men
are participating in the study,
answering questions about medical
mistrust, historical discrimination,
cultural beliefs and familial relations. Along with a team of bilingual
interviewers, the researchers are
exploring topics such as: perceptions
of and experiences with the U.S.
health care system; men's influence on women's decisions; levels of
health literacy; and wariness toward
hospitals and treatments.
Trust Among Kin
Kue's own ethnicity, along with a
decade's experience as a caseworker
and researcher at Portland's Asian
Family Center, have been essential
to building trust among the participants, whose lives typically revolve
around close-knit kinship networks.
“Jennifer is highly committed
to her community and passionate
about improving their health and
well-being,” says Thorburn. “She is
a critical link between the research
team and the Hmong community.”
In addition to her research on the
Hmong Breast and Cervical Cancer
Project, Kue is focusing her doctoral
dissertation on Hmong knowledge of
hepatitis B, along with risk perceptions and barriers to screening and
vaccination. Previous research,
she notes, has found high rates of
hepatitis B infection among the
Hmong, accompanied by low levels
of screening and vaccination.
“It's not enough to provide
written information for people,” Kue
insists. “In our community, communication is word of mouth. You have
to have that personal connection.
You can't just pass out pamphlets
and expect to solve the problem.”
Laotian Dreams
When Kue talks about her homeland, her emotions run raw. She
was just a year old when her mother
and grandparents fled communist
forces after the fall of Saigon in 1975,
traveling by foot through the Laotian
jungle at night, crossing the Mekong
River and eventually finding safety
in a Thai refugee camp. There, they
were reunited with her father and
his two older brothers, both of whom
had been soldiers who had fought for
the United States during the Vietnam
War. A year later, a California church
sponsored the family's emigration to
the United States.
Kue dreams of living and working
in Laos someday with her husband
and two small children.
“I've never been back to see the
place I was born,” she says, brushing
at the tears welling up in her eyes.
“It'll be an emotional trip.”
As for the study, she hopes to translate the results into tools for change, to
design a culturally sensitive intervention based on the findings.
“We have a commitment to the
community to go that extra step —
not just get this information and let
it sit on a shelf,” Kue says. “We need
to find what works.”
FALL 2010 » TERRA
7
A world away
from their native
black-water habitat,
microbes colonize
a petri dish in Taifo
Mahmud’s lab.
Nature’s Medicine Chest
Life-saving medicines from rainforest rivers
By Lee Sherman | Photos by Karl Maasdam
hotspots, the Indonesian archipelago curving between the Indian
and Pacific oceans. In the steamy
jungles of Borneo, Sumatra, Papua
and hundreds of the nation's smaller
islands, there are unique ecosystems
alive with undiscovered organisms:
“black-water” rivers. Black water,
not to be confused with muddy
water, is transparent but tinted, like
tea, by tannins leached from peaty
soils. Its acid level is like vinegar's.
A native of Indonesia, Mahmud
was eager to investigate the pharmaceutical promise of black-water
ecosystems. So he reached out to
Dwi Andreas Santosa, director of
the Indonesian Center for Biodiversity and Biotechnology, in pursuit
of samples. Santosa dove in — literally. On Kalimantan (the Indonesian
part of Borneo), home of the rare
Kalimantan orangutan, Santosa and
his research team donned swimsuits to collect soil from the beds of
the Pangkoh Lima and Sungai Kala
black-water rivers.
Since the 750 microorganism
samples were delivered to OSU in
2005, Mahmud and his colleagues
Mark Zabriskie and Phil Proteau have
turned up a number of compounds
with the power to fight infections
and shrink tumors. As a result,
diseases ranging from malaria to
melanoma are a little bit closer to
being scourges of the past.
Germ to Germ
T
aifo Mahmud opens the
incubator and, picking up the
stacked petri dishes one by
one, raises them to the light. Each
round, lidded container displays a
colorful pattern pocked or sprayed
across the agar. The researcher points
with pride to the branching abstractions of yellows and rusts, oranges
and greens, the visible etchings
of billions of microscopic bacteria
multiplying in his Oregon State
University lab.
8
TERRA » FALL 2010
In these microbial colonies
collected from the rich, dark soils of
Indonesia's equatorial rainforests, he
foresees nothing less than a healthier
future for humankind. From them he
has isolated compounds that could
become the basis for new antibiotics
and drugs to fight cancer.
“Microorganisms have yielded
most of the therapeutic agents that
have revolutionized modern medicine,” says Mahmud, a medicinal
chemist in the College of Pharmacy
who specializes in natural products.
“Since the 1940s when soil bacteria
were first identified as producers of
antibiotic substances, over 10,000
biologically active compounds have
been isolated from these organisms,
including over 3,000 antibiotics.”
The microbes in OSU's Pharmaceutical Science lab, which are
undergoing tests or “assays” that
will determine their power to heal,
originated halfway around the
world in one of Earth's biodiversity
It seems paradoxical, fighting
bacteria with bacteria. Yet scientists have long known that these
ubiquitous, single-celled microbes
have the power to heal as well as
to infect. Their curative properties
reside in substances they produce in
their natural environment to ward
off threats or to communicate with
each other. Researchers call these
substances “secondary metabolites,”
meaning they're not essential to
maintaining life but instead serve
secondary functions.
To the outsider, Mahmud's lab is
a bewildering jumble of scientific
gear. It's a place where mysterious,
multihued liquids in test tubes and
flasks are furiously agitated in orbital
shakers. Where shelves are jammed
with jars of culture media (the agar
ingredients on which the bacteria
grow) labeled with the names of such
familiar nutrients as soy, potato, yeast
and malt. Where microbial strains
with unpronounceable names are
subjected to technical procedures like
spectrometry and chromatography.
It's on the posters festooning the
laboratory walls where the essence
of the research starts to become
evident. Diagrams of the microbes'
molecular structures, their honeycombed hexagonal cores and trailing
side chains of smaller molecules,
are the graphic representations of
the lab's findings. As the isolation
and manipulation of these complex
chemical structures advances,
Mahmud and his colleagues move
another step closer to lifesaving
breakthroughs.
“The original extract contains
hundreds of compounds,” says
Mahmud. “It's like when you make
a cup of cappuccino. You have sugar,
you have lactose, you have caffeine,
you have everything in there. If you
want to isolate one compound, like
the caffeine, you have to separate
it from everything else. We split
the extract into fractions and keep
narrowing down the target until we
get a pure compound.”
Once a promising anti-infective
compound has been isolated, the
researchers clone its genetic “backbone” — its structural blueprint
— and then manipulate the genes to
create improved versions. They also
send samples of the compound to
the Oregon Translational Research
and Drug Development Institute, a
public-private signature research
center, for more tests. Anti-tumor
compounds are sent to the National
Cancer Institute for further study.
The compound's chemical properties and structure are also entered
into the Natural Products Library, a
searchable database.
Taifo Mahmud, a doctor’s son, hopes to help
millions by discovering new drugs.
Novel Compounds
A number of brand-new compounds
have turned up in Mahmud's blackwater samples. Among them are six
novel metabolites, which the OSU
researchers have named “panglimycins” after the river Pangkoh Lima
where they were collected. Seven
additional new compounds called
“limazepines,” a growing group of
antitumor antibiotics isolated from soil
bacteria, were recently found as well.
As described in the Journal of
Natural Products and the Journal
of Antibiotics, each of the new
compounds takes a different form in
lab tests — from colorless crystals to
yellowish powders, oils or “needles.”
Outward color and texture sometimes
give clues to underlying molecular
structure.
Finding novel compounds such as
these is just the first step on a long
journey to a viable drug — a journey
that can take decades.
“Even if we find a bioactive molecule, the pharmaceutical companies
have to do a lot of testing and clinical
trials before they can market it,” says
Mahmud. “We're basically at the
beginning of the whole process. The
compound we isolate today may not
become a drug for 20 years. We're realistic enough not to get frustrated.”
FALL 2010 » TERRA
9
Countdown on the Columbia:
Deadline looms for the river that turned darkness to dawn
By Aimee Lyn Brown | MAP by Gavin Potenza | Photo by Jan Sonnenmair
A
s we grow up, we have new
experiences. We learn something we didn’t know before.
We consider others. Make discoveries. Make mistakes. We fail and we
succeed. In 1964, representatives of
the United States and Canada ratified
a treaty relating to the cooperative
development of the water resources
of the Columbia River Basin. They
didn’t know what we know now.
The Beginning
There’s a river up in the Northwest
that winds around mountains and
rolls down valleys. Across flood
plains and through wetlands,
it slips like nature’s long wet
tongue searching for the salt of the
Pacific Ocean. Narrow and noisy
at its headwaters in the Canadian
Rockies, the river widens, slows and
quiets as it drops south and west. It
hides its energy deep, but this is a
masquerade, not a natural act.
Nearly every drop of the Columbia
River, the most powerful river in
North America, is controlled from
a dark fifth-floor room of a marble
building in Portland, Oregon. I
know. I’ve been there.
In between my first and second
year of graduate school, I was offered
a fellowship with the weather and
stream-flow forecasting group at
the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). The offer came after I
presented a conference poster on
the implications of climate change
for current snow-measuring techniques in the Columbia River Basin.
In faded Levis and a wool sweater,
10
TERRA » FALL 2010
my hair unbrushed, I stood in front
of a group of agency administrators,
academics and executives and spoke:
“It appears we’re headed for trouble.
Under a range of warming scenarios
our current measurement locations
may likely be unreliable. Basically,
we won’t know what we have, so we
won’t know what we’re going to get.”
I was referring to our understanding
of climate-driven changes in snow
accumulation at elevations above
4,500 feet and how associated spring
runoff would affect the hydrology and
water availability within the Columbia
River Basin. Turns out that’s a bit of
a hot button topic, and a week later
the lead hydrologist at BPA called and
offered me a slot with his group.
I’m for fish, diverse alternative
energy portfolios, constrained growth,
clean water, big winters, crunchy
Northwest culture and wild rivers.
I’m against dams, energy trading, big
developments, suits and some days,
the federal government. I almost
turned him down, but I had strong
encouragement from Anne Nolin,
Oregon State University associate
professor in geosciences, and Aaron
Wolf, department head for geosciences
and an international expert on transboundary waters.
I signed on the line.
Utilized for Maximum Benefit
The Columbia River Basin is the
fourth largest river basin in North
America. It covers more than
259,000 square miles and spans the
international border between the
United States and Canada. It is one of
Roll on, Columbia, roll
on, roll on, Columbia,
roll on
Your power is turning
our darkness to dawn
So roll on, Columbia,
roll on.
— Woody Guthrie, chorus from Roll
On, Columbia, Roll On (1941)
» In Brief
THE ISSUE The international treaty that
defines responsibilities for hydropower
and flood control on the Columbia River
could come under formal discussion as
early as 2014. Issues such as climate
change, endangered species and
recreation were not envisioned when the
original treaty was ratified in 1964.
OSU LEADERSHIP As associate director
of OSU’s Program in Water Conflict
Management and Transformation,
Lynette de Silva is working with
colleagues at four other universities to
inform future negotiations. Organizers
are convening representatives of state
and federal agencies, tribal governments,
nonprofit organizations, businesses and
universities at a symposium November
7-9, 2010 in Corvallis.
FALL 2010 » TERRA
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the most heavily developed rivers in
the world in terms of hydroelectric
power, capable of generating more
than 21 million kilowatts of energy.
The first major hydroelectric dam
on the Columbia River was completed
in 1938. Located 40 miles east of Portland, Bonneville Dam was followed by
the completion of Grand Coulee Dam
in 1941. Bonneville, a run-of-the-river
dam (it uses natural flow, not a large
reservoir, to generate power), was
designed with fish ladders to allow
for the migration of native anadromous fish species. Grand Coulee,
constructed as a storage reservoir,
was not. These two dams were the
beginning. Twelve other major federal
dams in the Columbia River Basin
followed on the main stems of the
Columbia and Snake Rivers. Another
400 dams were built in the smaller
reaches and tributaries. The primary
purpose of these structures: flood
control, hydropower and irrigation.
The Columbia River is about
1,200 miles long from headwaters
to mouth. If all the dams in the
Columbia Basin were lined up on the
main stem, there would be a dam
roughly every three miles. Their
operation and management falls to
three entities in the United States:
the Bonneville Power Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers
and the Bureau of Reclamation.
“The infrastructure on the
Columbia has created many benefits,
such as power generation, flood
control, irrigation, navigation and
recreation, but it has been to the
detriment of the fish population
and aspects of the ecosystem, and
it has resulted in the displacement
of communities and indigenous
cultures,” says Lynette de Silva,
associate director for OSU’s Program
in Water Conflict Management and
Transformation.
Since development of the Columbia
River began, human use and reliance on the system have increased. In
the last 60 years, population and per
capita income have tripled across the
Northwest, and irrigation, hydro-
12
TERRA » FALL 2010
Stories by Aimee
Lyn Brown (OSU MS
in Geosciences, ‘09)
have appeared in
the New York Times,
The Oregonian and
National Geographic
online.
power and flood control have experienced significant growth.
Wolf, a leader in a university
consortium to reconsider the Columbia’s future, notes that communities
are becoming more dependent on
the river. At the same time, factors
such as climate change, demographic
shifts and degrading infrastructure
will challenge the management
abilities of federal and state agencies (see “Linking Climate Sciences
and Society,” Pg. 28). At stake are
domestic needs, fisheries, ecosystems and recreational opportunities,
which are becoming major economic
drivers across the basin
A Lot Can Change in 46 Years
In 1964, the United States and
Canada ratified a slight, 20-page
document. The Treaty Between the
United States of America and Canada
Relating to the Cooperative Development of the Water Resources of the
Columbia River Basin created the
operating system for the Columbia
River dams and the division of
the power benefits. It led to the
construction of three large storage
dams in British Columbia, which are
used for downstream flood control
and power generation at the lower
run-of-the-river dams.
For the last 46 years, the treaty
has guided the cooperative management of the river for flood control
and hydropower. Today, these are
still important areas of focus and
management; however, new issues
have emerged.
During the drafting and implementation of the treaty, the environment and cultural and ecological
health were not primary issues. The
treaty focused on development of
hydropower and on flood control
for the mutual benefit of the two
countries and has been extremely
successful in those two areas, says
Barb Cosens, an associate professor
at the University of Idaho Waters
of the West and College of Law. She
notes that it was negotiated at the
national and provincial levels with
minimal public involvement. Today,
she adds, communities on both sides
of the international boundary have
far greater capacity to demand a
voice in the future of the basin.
In many ways the treaty is operating in the manner for which it
was designed, says Cosens. There
are issues, however, that were not
recognized in the original treaty and
that may now need to be addressed.
Examples include in-stream
ecosystem services (fisheries, water
quality and endangered species
habitat), cultural practices and
recreation. Provisions in the treaty
allow for either the United States
or Canada to call for its termination after September 2024 with a
minimum 10-year notice. As a result,
2014 has become a target for stakeholders and interested parties who
seek to evaluate the treaty.
A formal opportunity for individuals and agencies to suggest changes
to the treaty was largely absent
during its initial drafting. That is no
longer the case.
A Consortium on Columbia
Basin Governance
In spring 2009, with input from
a consortium of five universities,
the University of Idaho convened a
symposium (Transboundary River
Governance in the Face of Uncertainty: The Columbia River Treaty,
2014) in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Cosens organized the meeting with
colleagues from OSU, the University of British Columbia, University
of Washington and University of
Montana. Their purpose is to help
inform future treaty negotiations by
determining some of the scenarios
Native people still dry salmon along the Columbia. Tribal rights could
become a factor in a renegotiated Columbia River Treaty.
and outcomes that might influence
Columbia River Basin decisions.
They explored questions about
governing an international watercourse in the face of uncertainties:
social and economic instability,
climate and environmental change,
continued regional population
growth, a threatened and deteriorating ecosystem, demand for nonfossil fuel energy and deteriorating
infrastructure. In one room, they
brought together the dam operators,
electricity generators, fishers, irrigators, environmentalists, wind surfers,
policymakers, scientists, engineers
and native people. “The potential for
new conversations is exciting,” says
Wolf. “We’re bringing together people
from all over the basin to help guide
the future of the river.”
The second symposium — scheduled
for November 2010 at Oregon State
University in Corvallis — will address
three key themes: needs and benefits,
participatory processes and transboundary governance mechanisms.
This Land is Our Land
Ultimately the federal governments
of the United States and Canada
determine the state of the Columbia
and its governance, including
whether or not to re-open the treaty
for negotiation. While I was working
at the Bonneville Power Administration, Anthony White (OSU Ph.D.,
Mathematics, ‘67), the secretary
to the U.S. Entity for the Columbia
River Treaty, regularly reminded me
that the Columbia is an international
navigable waterway subject to the
authority of the State Department
and other federal agencies. Withdrawals for municipal and farming
purposes generally fall under state
control. In many ways, White was
right, but the river is much more
than that.
The Columbia River is my river. It’s
your river. Your children’s and your
parents’. It’s the river of the salmon
and the alder. The sturgeon. Snails.
Douglas fir. Beaver. Osprey. Eagle.
It’s our river. By coming together as a
University Consortium on Columbia
River Governance, OSU and its
partners are helping to make sure all
our voices, and all our concerns, are
heard and explored using the best
research available
FALL 2010 » TERRA
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Most at home in the city,
Shelley Jordon teaches in
Corvallis and paints in her
Portland studio. (Photo:
Jan Sonnenmair)
A Feeling
for Family
Personal relationships drive Shelley Jordon’s art
By Angela Yeager
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TERRA » FALL 2010
When Shelley Jordon was growing up in Brooklyn,
she got in trouble for pulling her mother’s books
off the shelves and drawing in the white spaces.
Her need to create was so strong that she couldn’t
resist, despite knowing her mom would be angry.
Inspired by MRIs of
her husband’s tumor, Shelley Jordon
created this painting
in encaustic, a mixture of pigment and
hot wax.
Many years later, as an adult reeling
from the news that her husband
had a brain tumor, Jordon followed
a similar urge. She printed his MRI
scans and started painting on top of
them, covering them with her brush
strokes, using personal imagery to
come to grips with her fear.
“It was like going to a new country,”
she says. “It was a whole new world
of visual subject matter that I didn’t
know existed, and it was my husband’s
brain. It was visually exciting to me
and at the same time a living document of the reality of our situation.”
Jordon, a professor of art at Oregon
State University, has been an artist
ever since she can remember. Art
has been not only her life’s work but
also a lifeline during difficult times.
Through trauma and transition, her
creativity draws from personal experience, but the feelings she captures
are universal, grounded in the daily
events that we share with the people
closest to us.
University. “This seems a pivotal
point in her career, almost a reinvention of her artistic interests, and it
will be fascinating to see where these
experiments will lead.”
Well Known for Still Lifes
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s,
Jordon worked steadily on still lifes,
focusing on the objects in her daily
surroundings. Her paintings were
featured in a one-person career retrospective at the Frye Art Museum in
Seattle. Other exhibits followed: the
Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art
Museum, the Northwest Biennial in
Tacoma, Washington and galleries in
San Francisco, Chicago and New York.
In 2005, everything changed.
Jordon and her family were in
Italy where Shelley was teaching as
a visiting professor. Her husband fell
ill, and they came home to Oregon
early, only to receive the news about
his brain tumor that was to refocus
their lives.
What I had been searching for was
movement, change — the very essence,
in some ways, of life.
Her early focus on still life paintings took a dramatic turn with the
uncertainty of her husband's condition. Capturing objects on a canvas
was no longer enough to express her
day-to-day feelings. She needed her
pictures to move, to express a reality
that was not fixed and a future that
was in doubt. She transformed
herself over a period of several years
from a renowned still-life artist to
a creator of award-winning handpainted animated movies.
“Shelley has recently embarked
on an exciting new direction,
exploring animation, installation
and video in works that introduce a
very moving type of content — the
vicissitudes of human relationships,”
says Sue Taylor, a respected art
critic and historian at Portland State
16
TERRA » FALL 2010
“Thankfully everything worked
out okay, and he is fine now, but that
period from diagnosis to recovery
really blew me open. And I started
doing work as much as to keep
myself sane, but also it took me
down an entirely different path,”
Jordon says.
She began drawing on her
husband’s MRI scans, layering image
on top of image. “Drawing on them,
I was thinking of previous traumas,
and it made me think about how
[with] each new trauma, we re-experience previous traumas. Part of what
was going through my mind was, I
was thinking of the possibility that
my daughter would not have a father,
and I thought about the fact that I
didn’t have a father growing up, and I
made all those connections.”
» In Brief
OSU Professor of Art Shelley Jordon combines a
deep background in painting with experimental
techniques in animation to capture fleeting
moments in family life. Almost derailed by her
husband’s illness, her career has grown through
a need to express feelings of risk, safety and
connections among generations. Her work has
received international attention.
Hot Wax and Pigments
The woman who identified herself
foremost as an artist began to worry
that she would never paint again. But
spurred by her need to create, she
started experimenting with different
forms of art, including an ancient
technique known as encaustic.
Sometimes called hot wax
painting, encaustic is a mixture of
heated wax and colorful pigments.
The medium resonated with Jordon’s
feelings: “You dig and scrape back
into the layers of the painting, and
it creates scars on the surface. The
process echoed the emotional state
I was in. They were beautiful little
paintings, but it felt transitory. I was
trying to find a new visual vocabulary through these processes.”
Soon after this time, another
family transition led Jordon to a
new step in her exploration. Her
daughter Clara was about to take a
box of stuffed animals to Goodwill.
Surprised and a bit saddened that her
daughter was parting with objects
from her childhood, she asked Clara
to take each animal out so Jordon
could paint them, layering one image
on top of another.
“Then I stopped and thought
maybe I had gone too far, maybe I
had painted too much,” Jordon says.
FALL 2010 » TERRA
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“And this led me to think I should
photograph the process so I will be
able to see exactly when I had gone
too far and should have stopped.”
Jordon’s first piece of animation,
“Angry Gorilla,” is a result of this
experiment. The process excited her.
Documenting each step by photographing a completed image made
her think of change and transition
and how art often reflects an end
result, not the process that led to it.
“When I am looking at you, I only
see you as you are right now, but you
as a person have an entire lifetime
of experiences that made you who
you are up to this point,” she says.
“And suddenly, it all started to come
together. What I had been searching
for was movement, change — the
very essence, in some ways, of life.”
In 2009, one of Jordon’s most
prominent pieces of work again
came from her home life. “When
my daughter turned 11, she started
pushing against me in ways that
made me think of how I did the same
thing to my mother,” she says.
“Family History” is Jordon’s
masterpiece, a short animation
comprised of 500 painted images
layered on a single piece of paper.
Geography of an Artist
Shelley Jordon grew up in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood. Raised
by her single mother, she doesn't remember any artists in her family but teachers praised her artistic talents.
She received a college scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in
Manhattan, where she focused on illustration. After receiving her master's
degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College in the late 1980s, Jordon said she was
offered three full-time teaching positions - one in Chicago, one in California and
one at OSU.
At the time, Jordon said she didn't know where Corvallis was. She felt out of
place in a small community and after a few years started looking at Portland.
"I'm an urban person; I need to be in the city," she says. "I remember driving
around in what is now called the Pearl District and saw a sign for the Irving
Street Lofts. It said, ‘Artists: Live/Work.'"
Living in a loft with no closets but what Jordon describes as an “amazing raw
space with fantastic light," she had the freedom to paint in what would become
her defined style for many years. Jordon was an acclaimed painter of still-life
images, many of which were up to 12 feet tall.
Jordon met her husband David in the laundry space of the building and soon,
both her personal life and her career came together.
“When I moved from Manhattan to the loft in Portland, the paintings got
bigger, and gradually the compositions changed, became less compressed, and
the skies became more open," she adds.
The paintings from this period include “Sweet Delicata," a piece on permanent display at OSU's Valley Library. Jordon has never worked from photographs
as some still-life painters do. She has always used what was around her, so as
she moved physical locations, her paintings changed.
“Any of my paintings that I look at, I know where I was not only internally
and emotionally, but also geographically," she says.
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TERRA » FALL 2010
With Yiddish music from Jordon’s
childhood as the soundtrack, the
film is sweet, melancholy and
reflects the changing dynamic of
families in a unique and profound
way. Jordon layers images of her
great-grandmother, grandmother,
her mother, herself and her daughter
until all the faces blend together and
are indistinguishable.
“‘Family History’ is about experiences, it was entirely stream of
consciousness and free association,”
Jordon explains. “I didn’t have a
narrative in mind, just some old
family photographs to draw on
for inspiration. I had gone from
spending three months on one
painting, to spending five seconds
on a painting and painting it out and
covering it up, and then, it doesn’t
exist anymore. It made me think of
the fragility of life, and it just freed
me to take risks.”
Jordon submitted “Family History”
to a short film competition at Marylhurst University in Portland. In
May 2009, it won the Critic’s Choice
Award, followed by the Judges Award
from Los Angeles Times film critic
Ken Duran at the Northwest Film
Festival. It was also screened at other
festivals around the world.
“I started seeing articles in the
press that said, ‘filmmaker Shelley
Jordon,’ and it really threw me,” she
said. “I am a painter. I had to learn to
achieve what I saw in my head.”
A New Journey
More animations followed: “Terremoto,” reflecting terror experienced in
an earthquake; “Morning Coffee,” an
installation at Marylhurst University.
Jordon’s newest project is tentatively titled “Anita’s Journey.” The
artist found inspiration in the life
story of her husband’s now-deceased
mother, Anita Greenstein, who spent
her childhood hiding from the Nazis
in World War II Berlin.
“His mother was six-years-old
when they sent into hiding and the
entire family survived and ended
up settling in Portland,” she says. “I
want to explore Anita’s point of view,
what it might be like to be this little
girl hiding in various locations, from
a coal storage warehouse to various
basements.”
Awards from the Oregon Arts
Commission and OSU’s Center for
the Humanities and Valley Library
enabled Jordon to travel to Berlin
last summer. In addition, she spent a
month in Jerusalem earlier this year
as one of four fellows at The American Academy in Jerusalem.
Her travels gave Jordon the
creative freedom to visualize the
place where her father’s mother hid
from the Nazis and the time to start
shaping those ideas into her next
animation. Again, she comes back
to the importance of family, and the
connections that shape people into
who they become.
“Clara was three when her
grandmother died, so she never got
to know her and know the person
she was,” Jordon says. “Not only is
this an incredible story of resilience,
and trauma, but it is the story of my
daughter’s grandmother told from
her point of view when she was a
little girl.”
Shelley Jordon’s animation, “A Family History,”
grew from a series of more than 500 paintings,
each one emerging from the one that preceded it.
Shelley Jordon exhibition at
OSU’s Fairbanks Gallery
Materfamilias
New media / Installations
January 10 to February 2, 2011
Reception for the artist at noon
Wednesday, Jan. 12
See oregonstate.edu/FairbanksGallery
FALL 2010 » TERRA
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A
The Persistence of Species
An ecologist seeks clues to forest biodiversity
By Lee Sherman | Photo courtesy of Matt Betts
This green hermit
hummingbird visits
a Heloconia tortuosa
in Costa Rica. The
species is part of
an OSU study that
tracks hummingbird
travels with a tiny
radio transmitter attached to its back.
20
TERRA » FALL 2010
thrush's melody,
warbler's trill and
sparrow's chip-chipchip form the musical
backdrop for a hike in
the woods. When birds sharing a
forest patch all sing at the same time,
the cacophony suggests the jumbled
chatter of a human social gathering,
with competing tones and pitches. In
the din, distinguishing among species
of warblers, for instance, or tracking
individual chickadees is tricky. Scientists who study birdsong call this the
“cocktail party” problem. Further
muddying the forest sound-scape
is background noise: rushing wind,
splattering rain, crashing branches,
foraging animals. Making sense of
this audio hodgepodge can test a
biologist's mettle.
Matthew Betts is not deterred.
The OSU researcher is taking an
innovative approach to recording
birdsong in old-growth and secondgrowth forests. About a dozen
microphones recently installed in
Oregon's H.J. Andrews Experimental
Forest are capturing the calls of
bird communities from high in the
canopy to low in the understory. A
parallel study is under way in New
Hampshire's experimental forest,
Hubbard Brook.
Concerned with widespread
reports of declines in bird populations, Betts is developing new ways to
analyze trends in biodiversity. “We're
looking at the distribution of 40 or
50 species across the entire elevation
gradient at each experimental forest,”
explains the assistant professor of
forest landscape ecology. “We want
to know why species live where
they do. Why do some species cut
off at 1,200 meters yet others persist
higher? Is it competition among
species? Is it vegetation that's driving
that relationship? Is it climatic? It's
basic research, but it has big implications for how we predict the effect of
climate change on animals.”
Birds by Bytes
Gathering acoustic data digitally,
he says, has big advantages over the
current practice: putting people in the
woods to count birds, song by song.
Still another technological advance —
artificial intelligence — will streamline the analysis of the electronic
data. By employing smart computers
that can “learn” to sort ambient
noise from distinct species sounds, a
team of computer scientists in OSU's
Ecosystem Informatics Program is
translating the recordings into signals
that can be read by computers. Betts
and his collaborators hope to push
forest ecology to a new level of efficiency and sophistication.
“We spend an immense amount
of time and money every year
surveying birds with technicians,”
Betts says. “The overall idea of
setting up microphones in the forest
was: Wouldn't it be cool if we could
have cheap, long-term data?”
But Betts's investigations don't
stop there. His research program,
which has taken him and his
graduate students all over Central
and North America — from pollination experiments in Costa Rica
to molecular studies of migratory
birds in New Brunswick, Canada
— has chalked up a lot of firsts:
first to influence warblers' nesting
choices with recorded sound. First
to put radio transmitters on tropical
hummingbirds. First to test continental-scale geographic-dispersal
patterns in the chemistry of feathers.
Each study launched from the
Betts Forest Landscape Ecology Lab,
no matter how far-flung geographically or out-front technologically,
has one overarching goal: to isolate
the effects of habitat loss, landscape
fragmentation and climate change on
biodiversity and species persistence
(survival over time).
Betts cites a 2010 report from the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature showing that steep
» In Brief
THE ISSUE Ecologists need to understand the
causes and consequences of population decline
in birds and other animal species across forested
and other landscapes.
OSU LEADERSHIP Matt Betts is developing new
ways to rapidly and efficiently identify birdsong,
leading to better knowledge of birds’ movement
patterns and persistence. His studies in North
and Central America contribute knowledge about
stresses on birds stemming from landscape
fragmentation, climate change and other factors.
declines in populations of birds,
mammals, amphibians, plants and
invertebrates are continuing across
the planet, despite some successful
efforts at conservation.
“Habitat loss and fragmentation
are known to be the primary cause
of species extinctions worldwide,”
he notes. “With thousands of species
verging on extinction, discovering
how animals respond to habitat
degradation and disruption is urgent
if we hope to reverse the trends.”
By opening all sorts of new
windows onto avian behavior — such
as using LiDAR (Light Detection
and Ranging) technology in a recent
habitat study with Woods Hole
Research Center — Betts has become
a noted innovator in the field of landscape ecology.
FALL 2010 » TERRA
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“Matt's research on the response
of bird populations to forest fragmentation has served as a critical
guide for many young and aspiring
ecologists,” says Benjamin Zuckerberg, a research associate with
the Citizen Science Program at the
Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Using
advanced statistical approaches, he
has made significant contributions
In the hardwood forests of New
Hampshire's White Mountains lives
the black-throated blue warbler.
Nesting in low-growing shrubs, this
abundant warbler is easy to find and
count, making it a favorite subject for
East Coast ornithologists.
“The black-throated blue warbler
is the lab rat of eastern avian demography,” jokes Betts, who first studied
warblers into picking poor places by
making them think other warblers
favored those spots. The scientists
played electronic warbler songs at 54
White Mountain locations - scrubby
areas with scant cover that warblers
normally would bypass. But having
heard their species' songs broadcast
as they flew over in the late summer,
many returning warblers chose the
sub-par nesting sites the following
spring. In fact, more than 80 percent of
first-time breeding males settled in the
bad habitat, Betts and his colleagues
reported in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“We were very surprised,” Betts told
Science magazine's blog, ScienceNOW.
“It was almost as if we'd attracted a
spotted owl (secretive old-growth
dwellers) to a parking lot.”
Taking cues from fellow warblers
is a shortcut to scoping out optimal
breeding grounds, Betts explains. It's a
behavior that can aid the species' adaptability to rapidly changing landscapes.
“The approach this bird uses can be
very efficient in allowing individuals
to find new habitat quickly when old
habitat has been lost or degraded,” he
says. “We're developing a library of
species that use this nest-site selection
strategy, which may make them less
sensitive to environmental changes
than species that are poor at finding
new habitat.”
Flight Paths
Betts and his colleagues have found that black-throated blue warblers in the White Mountains of New
Hampshire choose nesting sites based on the songs of others in their species. (Photo: Matthew Betts)
to the study of ecological thresholds
and breeding-site selection in forest
birds. Land managers and policymakers, as well as graduate students,
appreciate his ease in communicating complex scientific concepts.
“Most importantly,” Zuckerberg
concludes, “the results of Matt's
research emphasize the role of landscape ecology in natural resource
conservation.”
22
TERRA » FALL 2010
the species as a post-doctoral fellow
at Dartmouth College.
These handy birds have given
Betts surprising new insights into
the purposes and powers of song.
Wondering how birds choose nesting
sites, Betts and a team of researchers
from Wellesley College and from
Queen's University and Trent University in Ontario, Canada, recently
ran an experiment to see whether,
in essence, they could “trick” the
The green hermit hummingbird of
Central America weighs over threetenths of an ounce, approximately
the heft of a good-sized chickadee. By
hummingbird standards, that's huge.
(In contrast, the Pacific Northwest's
ubiquitous rufous hummingbird tips
the scale at just one-tenth of an ounce.)
The green hermit's heavyweight status
makes it a prime candidate for tracking
by radio transmitter because although
the transmitter weighs less than onehundredth of an ounce, it's too heavy
for the tiny rufous to carry on its back.
Betts and Ph.D. student Adam
Hadley wanted to investigate
hummingbirds' travels through
the rainforests of Costa Rica to
help explain why pollination levels
around the world appear to be dropping. In particular, they wondered
how fragmented forests — patches
of trees left stranded amidst areas
cleared for roads, crops or timber
— affect the flight patterns of the
iridescent, curved-billed pollinators.
“Recently, people have started
realizing that landscape configuration, especially fragmentation —
how habitat is distributed — can be
quite important for some species,”
Betts explains.
So in the winter of 2008, the
researchers glued miniature transmitters to 19 green hermits with
false-eyelash adhesive and then
monitored the birds' movements
for several weeks until new feather
growth made the transmitters fall
off. In the journal Biology Letters,
the scientists reported that the birds
adhered closely to forested corridors in the landscape, clinging to
treed areas while avoiding open
patches devoid of cover — even when
that meant flying longer distances.
Not only are the longer distances
potential stressors for the birds, but
the avoided patches may miss being
pollinated, thus losing plant diversity over time.
“We don't yet know for sure if
pollen dynamics are being disrupted
by forest fragmentation, but we think
so,” says Betts. “Our hummingbird
research suggests that maintaining
riparian corridors of forest between
patches could be quite important for
pollination dynamics.”
Heroic Triumvirate
Betts' heroes — three titans of biology,
Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr and
Paul Ehrlich — all began their careers
studying animals (ants, birds and
butterflies, respectively). But over
time, they extended their inquiries to
such sweeping scientific questions as
the mechanisms of evolution, Earth's
ecological thresholds and the origins of
human nature. All became active in the
political sphere, advocating on behalf of
the planet's long-term survival.
While not presuming to share the
lofty status of these science superstars, Betts imagines his career taking
a similar beyond-the-lab trajectory.
For him, however, public-policy
work will be a homecoming of sorts.
As an undergraduate, motivated by
his childhood wanderings among
the woods of New Brunswick, he
aspired to conserve the forests where
so many mysteries were secreted. So
he studied political science. He soon
realized, however, that if he hoped
to influence policy, he first needed
grounding in the fine and complex
details of ecosystems, in what he calls
the “micro” sphere of forest management and conservation. So he went
back to study biology and ecology.
Still, it's at the policy level where
discoveries give rise to action. Betts
sees himself looping back more
strongly to the macro sphere as time
goes by. “It can get very frustrating
doing science when you're just
pumping out scientific papers and
nobody's paying any attention to it,”
says Betts, who serves as OSU's representative on Oregon's State Forest
Advisory Committee, which provides
input to the Oregon Department
of Forestry on forest management
issues. “That's what drew me to the
College of Forestry, actually. There's
this potential link between basic
research and applied work, and then
translation into some kind of action.”
If science can, for instance, reveal
how fragmentation affects animals,
as opposed to simple habitat loss, the
findings can guide decision-makers
in tangible ways.
“We have the power to design
landscapes in different ways,” Betts
notes. “Losing the same amount of
habitat, developers or foresters could
decide to leave wildlife corridors, or
they could decide to leave a single big
patch instead of making four little
ones. It becomes pretty important
when thinking about the persistence
Volunteers help
teach computers to
ID birds by song
Recording the subtle syllables, notes
and motifs that distinguish one bird species
from another requires some pretty sophisticated gear. But for OSU researchers, collecting audio data in an old-growth forest last
summer was a walk in the park compared with
analyzing it. “It’s a lot of data,” reports Jed
Irvine, a faculty research assistant in the OSU
Bioacoustics and Machine Learning group.
Confronted with a terabyte of digital sound
from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest,
Irvine and a team of students in the College of
Engineering are building a website that will let
them borrow the ears of experienced birders
to identify avian singers. Volunteers can log
on and identify the bird songs they hear. IDs
will then be used to “teach” computers how to
distinguish a robin from a Swainson’s thrush or
a tree swallow for a study being led by forest
ecologist Matt Betts.
“The bioacoustic team is developing software
that will automatically identify bird species —
perhaps even individual birds — so that we can
assess population distribution on an ongoing
basis,” Irvine explains. Then, without a hint of
irony, he adds, “It’s a lofty idea.”
Visit the site at http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/bird
of species.”
Still, he says, doing science, even
stopping for a minute to enjoy a
warbler's stirring call, can be a satisfying refuge from the contentious
political arena.
“Basic research is nice because
it doesn't depend on people that
much,” he admits. “So if I'm
depressed about the rate at which
my findings get turned into policy, at
least I'm finding out some interesting
things about nature. That's good in
itself.”
FALL 2010 » TERRA
23
W
Stones on Ice
Greenland streams hold clues to future sea levels
By Lee Sherman | Photo by Karl Maasdam
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TERRA » FALL 2010
Joe Stoner has led studies
in the Gulf of Alaska, the
Arctic, the North Atlantic
and Chile as well as
Greenland.
hy should the residents
of Seattle, San Francisco,
New York City and Boston
worry about warming in Greenland,
an ice-laden island in the North
Atlantic? Because if all the water
locked in the massive Greenland Ice
Sheet flowed into the oceans, lowlying coastal cities worldwide would
be inundated.
“The Greenland Ice Sheet could
contribute up to seven meters of
global sea-level rise if it were to
melt,” says OSU marine geologist
Joseph Stoner. “We don't know if it's
going to melt, but that's how much
water is in the ice sheet. Therefore,
we need to better understand the
processes at work.”
In search of that understanding,
Stoner and researchers at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison are
studying sediments flowing seaward
in streams and rivers on the island's
southern tip. Those sediments —
remnants of bedrock pulverized
over eons by grinding glaciers and
rushing rivers — hold clues to the ice
sheet's history across geologic time,
he explains. Scientists know that the
680,000-cubic-mile chunk of snow,
compressed from white to crystalline blue over many millennia, is
receding. Satellite images from the
past several decades show significant
shrinkage. What isn't known is the
speed of melting or the extent that
melting might take in coming years.
By studying Greenland's past with
support from the National Science
Foundation through the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act,
Stoner and his colleagues hope to
bring its future into clearer focus.
“The key to understanding the
Greenland Ice Sheet is to use the
natural record of past variability as a
sort of manual to what it could do in
the future,” says Stoner, an associate
professor in the College of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Sciences. “We're trying
to use the natural geological archive to
test how the ice sheet works.”
To recreate the ice sheet's prehistoric behavior, he and his graduate
students collected sediment samples
last summer, some dating back to
Earth's infancy when the atmosphere
was a soup of greenhouse gases.
Tracing the origins of these silts and
sands should tell the researchers
where the island was exposed during
"interglacial” periods — warm
stretches between ice ages — and
where it lay buried beneath tons of
frozen snow during colder periods.
The “markers” that will reveal
these ancient patterns are both
chemical and magnetic, Stoner says.
He explains that isotopes of lead,
strontium and neodymium serve
as chemical hieroglyphics, telling
stories about the ages and origins of
the sediments that contain them.
And the magnetic properties of those
sediments lend additional details to
the geologic record.
To read the magnetic profiles of
marine and terrestrial sediments,
Stoner's lab recently acquired a
new-generation instrument: a
super-conducting magnetometer for
measuring the magnetic properties
and composition of rocks. Instead of
using liquid helium as a coolant like
old-style cryogenic magnetometers
do, this one compresses helium gas
till it reaches 3.5 degrees Kelvin,
“just a little above absolute zero,”
Stoner says. “It works through superconductivity, which only happens at
extremely cold temperatures.”
Stoner's findings could cause
scientists to rethink Greenland's role
in climate-change scenarios.
“When I first got into this field,
people thought ice sheets behaved
really slowly,” he says. “But the
geologic evidence is telling us ‘no.’
We just didn't understand the
process by which ice sheets behave
quickly. It's a reminder that just
because you don't understand the
process, it doesn't mean something's
not happening.”
FALL 2010 » TERRA
25
NEW TERRAIN // Science on the Horizon
Linking Climate Sciences and Society
Northwest universities team up to serve regional needs
As Northwest farmers and homeowners, fishermen and business enterprises, timber operators and political leaders confront the
mounting impacts of climate change, OSU and other universities are
seeking better ways to lend support and ease transitions.
Two new regional climate centers will apply research to
resource management issues faced by the general public and
policymakers. With funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Pacific Northwest Climate
Decision Support Consortium will bring together faculty from
OSU and the universities of Oregon, Washington and Idaho and
Boise State, as well as Oregon Sea Grant and extension services,
to meet the climate-related needs of businesses, governments,
tribes and non-governmental organizations.
One of 11 regional groups, the program — Regional Integrated
Sciences Assessments (RISA) — will help “to realign our nation’s
climate research to better serve society,” according to NOAA.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of the Interior has established a
new Climate Science Center with OSU, the University of Washington
and the University of Idaho to assist state and federal agencies.
“It is the agencies that create action plans to adapt to climate
change,” says Phil Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change
Research Institute at OSU and a leader in both of the new centers.
“What the Climate Science Center will do is provide the science
needed to help the agencies make the best decisions. There also is
a role for training students on climate change-related issues and
preparing them to work in the organizations the center will serve.”
Spin-Offs Boost Oregon’s Economy
On the Web
Despite the lingering economic slump, OSU spinoffs in portable kidney dialysis, solar
energy and other cutting-edge technologies are generating jobs and dollars in Oregon.
Last fiscal year, OSU spinoffs created 90 jobs and generated $2.67 million in revenue for
the university, the Portland Business Journal reported in August.
Venture capital firms, too, have been bullish on OSU-originated firms. Home Dialysis
Plus and Azuray Technologies, for example, received investments of $55 million during
the first half of 2010 alone. They garnered more than half of the $107 million invested in 13
Oregon companies in that period.
Since 1982, Oregon State has spun out 23 companies. Four or five more startups are in the
pipeline for the coming year, says Brian Wall, director of OSU’s office of technology transfer.
“We’re at a point where we’re analyzing the technology to be sure it doesn’t need
significant R&D investment,” Wall told Business Journal Web editor Suzanne Stevens.
“Then we’ll help make introductions to potential investors and CEOs.”
See What’s coming up at Science Pub
Corvallis and the latest news headlines
from OSU research on the new Terra website. At Oregonstate.edu/terra, you’ll find a
searchable archive of past Terra stories as
well as videos, blogs and upcoming events.
Listen to a podcast with Taifo
Mahmud in the College of Pharmacy. This
doctor’s son grew up with the knowledge
that medicines save lives but lose their
effectiveness over time. His father had
this advice: “‘If you do pharmaceutical research and develop drugs, you can
help millions of people every day.’” (See
“Nature’s Medicine Chest,” Pg. 10).
(Photo: Lynn Ketchum)
(Photo: iStockphoto.com)
Neil Shay to Lead OSU’s Wine Institute
Oregon’s storied pinots and chardonnayS have a new
champion at OSU: Neil Shay. The molecular biologist and biochemist from the University of Florida has taken the helm of the
new Oregon Wine Research Institute housed at OSU. Besides
studying bioactive compounds in plants, including wine grapes,
as part of his research program in Florida’s food science and
nutrition department, Shay brings award-winning amateur winemaking to his list of qualifications to lead OSU’s partnership with
the state’s $1 billion industry.
“Neil understands how to connect research and business
in large-scale projects that are results-oriented,” says Sonny
Ramaswamy, dean of OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
Adds Oregon wine pioneer and industry leader David Adelsheim:
“He’s also a passionate wine consumer. Having made his own
wine, grown his own grapes, worked informally at a winery and
toured wine regions of France makes him quite rare in academia.”
(Photo: Lynn Ketchum)
26
TERRA » FALL 2010
watch Fingerprinting Greenland,
a video with OSU marine geologist Joe
Stoner, who leads efforts to understand
the past behavior of the melting ice sheet
(See “Stones on Ice,” Pg. 24).
The Greening of Wood Products
wood products laced with toxins such as formaldehyde may soon go the way of
leaded gasoline.
Safer, greener wood products are on the horizon thanks to a novel research partnership funded by the National Science Foundation. Backed by a five-year NSF grant, OSU
and Virginia Tech will collaborate with a veritable who’s-who of private wood-products companies to design a new generation of environmentally friendly wood-based
composite materials. Weyerhauser, Jeld-Wen and six other leading companies are
kicking in $30,000 each. With matching funds from Oregon BEST (Built Environment and
Sustainable Technologies), the new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center will
have total support of $2.2 million to investigate new generations of adhesives, plywood
and other materials for building homes, offices, schools and other spaces where people
live and work.
“OSU and Virginia Tech are both international leaders in wood science and technology,” notes OSU’s Fred Kamke, a wood sciences professor who is the OSU site director
for the new center. “This major new initiative will build on those strengths. Composite
products allow for more efficient, sophisticated and competitive uses of wood, and
they’re the future of the wood products industry.”
AND Watch a video about Shelley
Jordon’s transition from a painter of still
lifes to animation artist. And see one of her
painted animations, which explore themes
in family life and personal experience (See
“A Feeling for Family,” Pg. 16).
FALL 2010 » TERRA
27
PERSPECTIVES // Research-Based Opinion
A Way Forward for Oregon’s
O&C Forests
By K. Norman Johnson
University Distinguished Professor | College of Forestry
Photo: Danielle White
Any fair-minded reading of the history of the O&C (Oregon and California
Railroad) lands in Western Oregon would
conclude that they were intended to provide economic support for the 18 counties
in which they reside. We, as a country,
have shifted their use to protection of
owls, fish and other creatures. How do
we make the counties whole? OSU senior
forestry students, in their “capstone”
course, have suggested a way forward.
Under the O&C Act of 1937, the Bureau
of Land Management’s (BLM) Western
Oregon forests shall be managed under
the principle of sustained yield for the
purpose of providing a permanent source
of timber supply and contributing to the
economic stability of local communities
and industries while also considering
other resources and other federal laws.
Concentrated in southwest Oregon, the
harvest from the 2 million acres of these
forests was a major source of employment for decades. Also the counties
received half of the stumpage revenue
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TERRA » FALL 2010
(in lieu of property taxes), an important
source of income for libraries, public
health and many other programs.
Legal challenges to the adequacy of
BLM conservation of threatened and
endangered species, especially the
northern spotted owl, led to a virtual
shutdown of BLM timber sales in the early
1990s, followed by the Northwest Forest
Plan developed by the Clinton Administration. While that plan has been praised for
its focus on biodiversity, its other goal of
providing a sustainable harvest of timber
has not been realized. Southwest Oregon
counties have been left on the edge of
financial disruption. The Oregon congressional delegation has struggled to provide
federal appropriations, but payments run
out in 2012, and prospects for renewal
are dim.
Last spring, my senior forest management class tackled this problem in two
ways: First, they developed management
strategies that could provide a predictable, sustainable long-term supply of
timber from these forests, and second,
they estimated the monetary value of
ecosystem services from these lands that
could be used as a basis of a permanent
federal appropriation to the counties.
Building on the limited cases in which
BLM has successfully harvested timber,
we focused on strategies that had immediate ecological benefits using harvest
methods that might be broadly acceptable to the public. We generally rejected
clearcutting and the harvest of oldgrowth. Rather, we focused on recent
science highlighting the need for forest
conditions that occurred historically
after large wildfires, where a significant
legacy of standing trees was left and
which allowed the new forest to emerge
gradually from the shrubs and forbs of
early successional ecosystems. Under
this scenario, the O&C forests could
fill a special ecological niche that our
private lands generally do not provide.
Student simulation of this scenario on
an area of these forests south of Marys
Peak suggests that they would provide a
modest, but sustainable, supply of timber
while contributing needed biodiversity.
Next, the students estimated the
monetary value of ecosystem services
from these lands focusing on carbon
sequestration and recreational use. Using
the current very low prices for carbon
and willingness-to-pay estimates for
recreational use, the students found that
tens of millions of dollars of ecosystem
services were being provided by the relatively small proportion of BLM’s forests
south of Marys Peak.
Studies show that the thinning being
done on these lands will decline in
coming decades until it essentially disappears, and counties will receive virtually
no income from them. That was never the
intent of either the O&C mandate or the
Northwest Forest Plan, but that is what’s
happening. The students’ plan may be the
last, best hope for long-term productive
management of these lands.
Farming on the Fringe
Urbanization can bring benefits to farmers
At America’s urban-rural fringe, there are plenty of
irritants to strain neighborliness: the stench of manure drifting
across a suburban cul-de-sac. A tractor hogging an exurban
roadway at rush hour. An influx of hobby farmers raising alpacas
and emus. Croplands subdivided and sold to city commuters.
Strip malls, industrial parks and housing developments sprawling
across a formerly pastoral landscape.
But the benefits at the urban-rural interface can outweigh the
detractions — at least in the short term, according to Oregon State
University’s JunJie Wu, holder of the Emery Castle Professorship of
Resource and Rural Economics.
“Urbanization is not necessarily a bad thing for struggling rural
communities,” says Wu, an economist in the College of Agricultural
Sciences. “It creates new opportunities along with the challenges.”
Farmers are finding novel market niches in the affluent urban
customer base, according to a new study by Wu and colleagues
at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Malawi and
the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. High on the
shopping lists of these new customers are high-value crops such
as cut flowers, ornamental trees and shrubs for landscaping,
Urbanization can bring new market
opportunities for farmers, says JunJie
Wu. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)
tree-ripened fruit, locally grown wines, organic vegetables and
u-pick berries — crops that generate more income per acre than
traditional commodities like wheat and corn.
The study — an analysis of county data from Oregon, Washington,
Idaho and California — also found that demand for “inputs” such as
farm machinery, seed and feed goes up during the early stages of
urbanization. So does demand for “outputs” such as food processing
facilities. Eventually, however, the critical mass of agricultural
activity wanes as cropland disappears. Suppliers and processors can
no longer sustain their businesses.
“Urbanization has a significant impact on agricultural infrastructure, farm production costs, and net farm income,” Wu concludes.
“Still, the agriculture-related opportunities of urbanization
outweigh the challenges in terms of the impact on farm income.”
In the tradition of OSU’s Emery Castle, a leader in the field of
resource economics and former president of the prestigious thinktank Resources for the Future, Wu also studies the environmental
ramifications of land-use policies. Recent research topics include the
impact of conservation programs on land values and how businesses
make decisions for environmental compliance.
For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments,
visit CampaignforOSU.org or contact the OSU Foundation at 800-354-7281.
FALL 2010 » TERRA
29
Terra
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Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
Native fishermen use shotguns to scare sea lions away from areas where salmon congregate in the Columbia River. Tribal rights, recreation and endangered species habitat
could come under consideration during a renewal of a 1964 treaty between the United
States and Canada. See “Countdown on the Columbia,” Page 12. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)
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