Dedication Ceremony Highlights Research Opportunities at UC Natural Reserve System’s Sagehen Creek Field Station

In 1907, the United States Forest Service established its first experimental forest to promote research that would support the management of the nation’s forests and watersheds. Almost a century later, on June 24, 2006, staff from the University of California and the U.S. Forest Service gathered at the Sagehen Creek Field Station north of Lake Tahoe to dedicate Sagehen Experimental Forest — the 84th experimental forest in a network that today encompasses 75 percent of the biomes across the nation.

The 7,900-acre Sagehen Experimental Forest will provide a wide range of new research opportunities. In addition to basic research, Bernie Weingardt, regional forester for U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region, foresees a number of projects that will have a direct impact on forest management. “We’re facing a host of critical issues,” he notes. “Global climate change, invasive species, fuels buildup, water quality and quantity, sensitive species and their habitats … and quite frankly, we have to have the best science available for us to begin to address these issues.”

Steve Eubanks, forest supervisor for the Tahoe National Forest, echoed Weingardt. He experienced the importance of experimental forests while working at the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, which includes the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. He observes: “They become magnets for research, places where our managers can come out and work with researchers. So the managers don’t just read about an experiment’s results three or four years down the road, but are actually on the ground, talking with the researchers firsthand, which also gives them an opportunity to influence what kinds of research occur.”

Under the guidance of Jim Kirchner, faculty manager for Sagehen Creek Field Station from the UC Berkeley Department of Earth and Planetary Science, and Jeff Brown, the field station’s resident manager, this NRS site has recently become the focus for a growing number of UC-based research projects. For example, John Battles and Scott Stephens, from UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, are conducting a major, multi-year investigation into the impacts and effectiveness of the Strategically Placed Area Treatments (SPLATS) used by the Forest Service to reduce the chance of high intensity / high severity fires. Another example is a multidisciplinary research group, led by UC Berkeley’s Inez Fung, that has just embarked on the $1.6-million Keck HydroWatch Center designed to investigate each phase of the water cycle and track the flow of water through watersheds. A major focus of the project will be to compare water movement in the Sagehen watershed to that at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve, another UC Natural Reserve System site, located in Mendocino County. A third example is a group from UC Davis, headed by Peter Moyle, that is using Sagehen Creek to investigate techniques for reintroducing native Lahontan cutthroat trout into Sierra Nevada streams.

Researchers are attracted to Sagehen for a number of reasons. First, the field station’s long-term data sets, compiled over the past 55 years, are unmatched in the Sierras. They include comprehensive animal and plant species lists, stream flow and chemistry data, weather (precipitation, snow depth, temperatures, etc.), soil maps and soil-pit data, and data from the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, to name just a few. The basin has been the research locale for over 70 doctoral and master’s degree theses, as well as hundreds of published papers.

Building upon this, Brown and Assistant Manager Faerthen Felix have overseen the installation of a wide range of new sensors and communication systems. As Brown explains: “Our data collection infrastructure within Sagehen Experimental Forest and the balance of the Central Sierra Field Research Stations (which includes the Chickering American River Reserve, the Onion Creek Experimental Watershed, the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, and North Fork Association Lands) is experiencing rapid growth in both the numbers and types of deployed sensor networks and the archiving of data collected. Examples include a variety of weather stations, stream-height data, ground-water depth and temperature, stream-depth sensors, tree-sap flow sensors, stream-water chemistry, and eddy correlation. We’re also talking to people about installing a number of other sensor systems and expanding sensor deployment over the next several of years.”

The SPLATS Project has also produced two major data sets that will be invaluable to all researchers. Over the last two seasons, their crews have conducted in-depth vegetation and fire fuel surveys throughout the watershed. During that period, they established 525 500-square-meter plots where they surveyed, measured, identified, and tagged all trees over 5 inches in diameter, compiled canopy closure data, and counted and classified ground fuels.

The other major tool resulting from the project was the creation of LIDAR-based maps of the basin. Flown in September 2005 and processed by UC Berkeley’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), the 1-meter resolution maps for both bare ground and vegetation heights have been processed to work in ARC GIS 9.0.

Sagehen Creek Field Station’s place within a broad network of sites dedicated to research and teaching is the final factor that increases its value. As part of the UC Natural Reserve System, it is one of 35 sites that protect key ecosystems throughout the state. And now, with its designation as an experimental forest, it becomes part of a network that spans the country.

Anne Bartuska, deputy chief for Research and Development at the U.S. Forest Service, emphasized the importance of these networks in her talk at the dedication ceremony: “We’re reinforcing the partnership between the UC System and the Forest Service management and research. Both the scientific community and the management community are turning to networks as a foundation for understanding how systems work.”