College of Forestry News

Authors led by OSU’s William Ripple and Christopher Wolf, in a paper published July 27 in BioScience, are calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels in response to the climate crisis.

Roadless national forests in the American West burn more often and at a slightly higher severity than national forests without roads, but the end result for the roadless forests is greater fire resilience, Oregon State University researchers say.

Oregon State University researchers have some good news for the well-meaning masses who place bird feeders in their yards: The small songbirds who visit the feeders seem unlikely to develop an unhealthy reliance on them.

Human-caused wildfire ignitions in Central Oregon are expected to remain steady over the next four decades and lightning-caused ignitions are expected to decline, but the average size of a blaze from either cause is expected to rise, Oregon State University modeling suggests.

Based in OSU’s Division of Extension and Engagement, partners in the center are the College of Forestry and OSU-Cascades in Bend.

“Fire refugia” – areas that burn less frequently and/or less severely than the landscape around them – are crucial for supporting post-blaze ecosystem recovery, including the persistence of species under pressure.

Oregon State University’s Steve Strauss led an international collaboration that showed the CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technique could be used with nearly 100% efficiency to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation.

OSU researchers broadcast marbled murrelet calls in mature forests and found that the threatened seabirds’ choice of breeding locations is strongly influenced by whether they hear other murrelets in the area.

Author and Professor Emeritus Edward Jensen, who taught thousands of students about tree identification in his tenure from 1976 to 2014 in the OSU College of Forestry, added several rare species from southwestern Oregon.

The Oregon State University Extension Service Fire Program is collaborating with state and community partners to launch a free webinar series to help prepare Oregonians for the 2021 wildfire season and beyond.