Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute Staff Highlights 2001

The following provides an overview of some of the Leopold Institute's General Highlights for fiscal-year 2006.

David Parsons initiated a new project with Gregg Fauth of the National Park Service to re-sample campsites in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. These sites were initially inventoried in the late-1970's and provide a valuable baseline for tracking change.

David Parsons serves as a member of the planning committee for the 2007 George Wright Society Conference in St. Paul, MN.

David Parsons participated as a member of Ecological Society of America's proposal review panel for National Park Foundation/Andrew Mellon Foundation's program to support post doctoral students working on plant studies in national parks.

David Parsons was appointed as lead of RMRS Strategic Program Area (SPA) team for Recreation. The team is charged with developing a strategic plan for the future of the Station's recreation research program. David Cole serves as a co-lead on this team.

David Parsons continues to serve on the committee to review proposals submitted to Grand Teton Natural History Association for graduate studies on the Greater Yellowstone Area through the Boyd Evison fellowship.

David Cole, in collaboration with Troy Hall at the University of Idaho, completed fieldwork on a series of nine studies related to management of visitors in highly used wilderness in the Pacific Northwest. Additional information about these studies and resultant reports are available on the Leopold Institute's website at: http://leopold.wilderness.net/research/fprojects/F007_B.htm.

David Cole developed a new agreement with the University of Montana to host a workshop in spring of 2007 on, "Beyond naturalness: desired conditions for protected area environments."

David Cole initiated a new project on restoration of subalpine campsites in the Sawtooth Wilderness, Idaho, including an agreement with the University of Montana to study soil restoration.

David Cole served on the steering committee for the Third International Conference on Monitoring and Management of Visitor Flows in Recreational and Protected Areas, held September 13-17, 2006 in Rapperswil, Switzerland.

Alan Watson received an award from the 8th World Wilderness Congress and the International Journal of Wilderness for international leadership in wilderness science, October 2005, Anchorage, Alaska.

Alan Watson provided funding and mentoring to 4 international students (China, Brazil, Zambia and Canada) at the 8th World Wilderness Congress in Anchorage, Alaska.

Alan Watson served as Editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Wilderness, "Anticipating change for wildland fire use in wilderness ecosystems," April 2006. Katie Knotek organized the symposium at the 8th World Wilderness Congress on which the special issue was based.

Alan Watson provided consultation with Northwest Russia Association of National Parks and Zapovednik Directors, October 2005, Lake Ladoga, Russia.

Alan Watson acted as Fulbright Senior Protected Area Specialist to the Komarov Botanical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, October 2005.

Alan Watson initiated the following three research projects in FY2006: "Factors of change influencing experiences and relationships with Wilderness: implications for stewardship," "Mapping personal and community meanings for planning and use of wildland fire and forest fuels treatments," and "GIS applications in mapping community meanings for fuel treatment analysis."

Alan Watson completed the following two research projects in FY2006: "The Situk River, Yakutat Resident Study: A Report on Local Relationships to Place" (with Neal Christensen), and "Managing with Mindfulness: Learning from High Reliability Organizations to Improve Public Outreach for Fire and Fuels Management" (with Anne Black).

Alan Watson was appointed RMRS National Fire Plan Portfolio head for Social Science.

Peter Landres received the Forest Service National Wilderness Award for "Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Research". Peter was awarded for his outstanding accomplishments in developing and implementing a national protocol for monitoring wilderness character. He was nominated by a group of national forest managers and the Washington Office.

Peter Landres secured agreement from the National Wilderness Program Leaders from each of the four wilderness management agencies to work together developing recommendations for a single protocol to monitor wilderness character across the entire National Wilderness Preservation System. Additional project details are available on the Leopold Institute website at: http://leopold.wilderness.net/research/fprojects/F014.htm.

Peter Landres completed the pilot testing of the new wilderness character monitoring protocol at the end of June 2006. Pilot testing was conducted in all nine Forest Service regions: on-site pilot testing was conducted at 4 locations, and off-site testing was conducted at 5 locations.

Peter Landres Completed the 230-page Technical Guide for Monitoring Selected Conditions Related to Wilderness Character.

Peter Landres served as co-lead of the Steering Committee developing a new Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training interagency course: "Natural and Cultural Resources Monitoring in Wilderness."

Carol Miller initiated a three year Joint Fire Science funded project to improve and evaluate approaches for mapping burn probabilities in a quantitative wildland fire risk analysis framework. She will be lead PI on this three year collaborative project with Mark Finney (Rocky Mountain Research Station), Alan Ager (Pacific Northwest Research Station) and Marc Parisien (Canadian Forest Service/UC Berkeley).

Carol Miller served on the Steering Committee for the “1st Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference,” held in Portland, OR in March 2006 and had lead responsibility for organizing a special panel session on WFU.

Carol Miller participated in Rocky Mountain Research Station's fire ecology research strategy meeting (Sep 20-22) during which a fire ecology research agenda was created for the station. This agenda will likely be used to facilitate cross-station collaboration of National Fire Plan research.
Carol Miller developed cooperative agreements for three projects to capture "deep smarts" of WFU managers, to look at WUI (Wildland urban interface) and its growth relative to wilderness areas and WFU (Wildland fire use) opportunities and to collect an additional year of post-fire data on stream communities.

Carol Miller served on a committee for improving the understanding of Wilderness values by fire management staff so that suppression activities do not unnecessarily impact these values. A guidebook was drafted for Wilderness administrators to distribute to incident management teams.

Steve Corn lead a workshop session on stressors of amphibian populations at the 2nd Alaska Amphibian Conference in Juneau, AK.

Steve Corn presented a summary of his projects to the staff at Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, Science Review in Bozeman, MT.

Vita Wright met with Robert Bennetts, Inventory & Monitoring Coordinator for the National Park Service, to co-develop a concept paper on the Diffusion of Innovations theory and how it can help integrate the NPS Vital Signs Monitoring results into management.

Katie Knotek completed the project, "High reliability organization of public involvement in agency decisions to accomplish wilderness fire management objectives."

Katie Knotek developed new study plan, "Understanding landscape values and meanings for the planning and application of fuel treatment and fire management on the Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana."

Anne Black developed and coordinated science delivery efforts for the National Science Synthesis Team. She developed and supervised FedSource, Enterprise Team and METI contracts and contractors to conduct project evaluation, website development, and web-based examples and training materials.

Anne Black was a participant in the "Trunk Monkeys" community of practice to identify, employ and test effectiveness of HRO concepts on the ground.

Anne Black was accepted into the 2006 Class of Leadership for Collective Intelligence training, Dialogos, Inc. which consists of 5 4-day workshops over 10 months.

Anne Black was appointed as RMRS National Fire Plan Science Portfolio head for Science Application and Delivery.

Anne Black developed and supervised contracts/contractors (METI, LC Services) to conduct field, analysis and write-up for Joint Fire Science Program Social Mapping project.

Brett Davis reviewed a manuscript for inclusion in 'The International Journal of Wilderness' as a guest associate editor.

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