The Natural Areas Conference

Natural Areas Association
Conference, September 15-18th 2009
Vancouver, Washington

I have spent the last few days at the Natural Areas Association’s 36th Annual conference in Vancouver, Washington. A great group of people here, smart and down-to-earth (in the best sense). It seems to me that the group is about evenly split between university people and government people. The keynote speakers on the opening day included Pat Pringle, a geology professor from Centralia College, who walked us through the complicated geological history of the state of Washington, Sam Green, the poet laureate of Washington, who shared some very fine verses inspired in part by his experiences living in a cabin on a remote Island off the Washington coast for 26 years, and Robert Pyle, a writer of fifteen books and an enthusiastic advocate of the experiential aspect of nature.

On Wednesday morning I attended three presentations on urban wilderness restoration and management issues in parks in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Northern Oregon. I learned that the contractor in the Philadelphia project had to contend with packs of wild dogs, that Cleveland actually has a lot of green space and that the managers there are having difficulty with an introduced and destructive earthworm (of all things), and that aspects of the Cooper Mountain state park woodland habitat restoration plan could be applied to our own Osborn Prairie management plan. Then I presented my Jackson Prairie, General Land Office Records paper in a session that was well attended. To my relief, there was nobody scheduled to speak after me, so I was able to relax and take my time. I got a good response, especially from two people in particular, one a retired forester with the Washington Department of Natural Resources who had worked with GLO records in the past and the other a researcher at Montana State who is using GLO records to map historic grassland (they didn’t use the word “prairie” in Montana at the time of European settlement).
The site of the conference, the Vancouver Hilton, is a LEED certified facility that borders the southern end of Esther Short Park. The park has a little splash pool with misters, a clock tower with a waterfall, and a playground area in addition to grassy expanses and scattered large redwoods, firs and sweetgums. It is not very big, a small city block in size, and is divided into informal “rooms” or distinct areas, all of which combine nicely into an integrated whole.

The Keynote speaker for the Wednesday luncheon was George Divoky, a biologist who studied seabirds on a remote island off the north shore of Alaska for over thirty years. In that time span he was able to document how global climate change made it possible for a certain bird to nest on the island by making the summers just a little bit longer. This bird fed on arctic cod, which are dependant on krill that live in the ice packs just offshore. Over time, again due to climate change, the ice packs moved north, or dissappeared altogether, and the lack of a critical protein source caused the birds to have much more difficulty raising chicks. Then, with increased warming, polar bears showed up. With no ice, the polar bears couldn’t hunt seals anymore, so they came to Cooper Island and ate all the birds Divoky was studying. So in thirty years the arctic ecosystem as changed enough to see this one species appear and then disappear on Cooper Island. The entire arctic ice pack will disappear at some point in our life time. Since the icepack is home to invertebrates that are the basis of the arctic marine food chain, this can be said to be the largest habitat loss in the world at this time. Scary stuff, and Divoky presented it in a way that avoided doomsday and desperate tones. He pointed out the good news: soon we will be able to grow wheat across Canada. The bad news: we will no longer be able to grow wheat in most of the USA. We need to plan for this.

Thursday was for field trips. I went to the prairies of the South Puget Sound. The cool thing was the Mima Mounds: a very regular pattern of mounds, each one about five feet tall and twenty feet wide, continuing uninterrupted by stream, hill or dale, over an expanse of hundreds of square miles. These mounds support a grassland habitat, which supports a pocket gopher species, numerous flowers (not many of which are blooming now) and lots of different butterflies (we didn’t see any). Thus far nobody has come up with the final word on what caused this formation. Too vast for humans, probably had something to do with patterns in the way the ice melted (suncups) at the end of glaciation and sediment from glacial wash collecting in the cups. We also visited a nursery managed by the Nature Conservancy for the production of seeds for prairie restoration.

On Friday my thesis professor returned to Mississippi, leaving me by my lonesome. I spent the morning in a workshop focused on the Nature Conservancy’s Conservation Action Plan. The CAP is a strategy for implementing restoration. It is much like the “goals and objectives” phase of the design process that we teach in the Landscape Architecture Department here at Mississippi State. One difference with the CAP is that there is a component by which the monitoring of the results, that is, collecting data to determine whether or not the objectives of the plan are actually being achieved, leads to possible revisions of initial stated objectives, so the process is cyclical and self-revising. I spent the afternoon exploring the Esther Short Park more closely and walking around the downtown area of Vancouver. For dinner, I tagged along with the conference organizers on a tour of some of Portland’s breweries. I met some very nice people who are involved in ecological restoration in its many aspects all across the country and who patiently indulged my curiosity about the details of their professional lives. And the food was very good. The next NAA conference is going to be in St. Louis and I am looking forward to it.