John McGuire (’93 Env. Sci., ’95 Biol.) directs the Private Lands Prescribed Fire Program at Tall Timbers, Inc. He holds a master’s degree in forestry from Auburn University and serves as president of both the Alabama Prescribed Fire Council and Alabama Invasive Plant Council.
His awards include 2016 Forest Conservationist of the Year in Jackson, Missouri; 2008 Longleaf Alliance Contribution Award in Auburn, Alabama; 2004 USDA Forest Service Centennial Congress Award in Asheville, North Carolina; 2003 South Carolina Wildlife Society Forest Stewardship Award in Columbia, South Carolina; and 2000 Governor’s Award for Forest Conservation in Montgomery, Alabama.
McGuire was the outreach coordinator for the Longleaf … » More …
Jesse A. Logan ’77 PhD is hiking up a mountainside in Yellowstone National Park and walking back in time. He starts at 8,600 feet above sea level, in a forest thick with the scent of fir and lodgepole pine, and with almost every spry step, the scenery changes. There’s an understory of grouse whortleberry, then accents of mountain bluebells and higher still, the whitebark pine, one of the oldest organisms of the Interior West.
Finally, the vegetation gives way to large swatches of scree. Logan’s 70-year-old legs have gone up 2,000 feet and back more than 10,000 years, from the lush vegetation of the twenty-first … » More …
Early successional forests, the stage following a major disturbance such as fire, windstorm, or harvest, have typically been viewed in terms of what is missing. Considered by the forest industry as a time of reestablishment or “stand initiation,” these early successional forests have been studied from the perspective of plant-community development and the needs of selected animals. Neither view fully grasps the diverse ecological roles of the early successional stage, argue WSU forest ecologist Mark Swanson and colleagues in a 2011 paper in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Forest management throughout the twentieth century focused at first on wood production and later … » More …
