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ORVALLIS - Oregon State University's Long Term Ecological Research at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest has received a six-year, $4.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation for fundamental and applied ecological research.

The grant, the fifth since 1980, was awarded to a diverse group of 30 scientists from four colleges at OSU and the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.

The funds will be used to conduct new research and continue long-term studies on forested watersheds. The program is interdisciplinary, with professors, graduate and undergraduate students from many university departments and researchers from several federal agencies working on common questions.

The Andrews Experimental Forest, located in the central Oregon Cascade Range, is one of 24 sites in the nation's Long Term Ecological Research Program. It is a key source of information about Northwest forest management, riparian zones, endangered species and many other critical environmental issues.

"The central question guiding the current studies in the Andrews LTER is how land use, natural disturbances and climate change affect three key ecosystem properties - carbon dynamics, biological diversity, and hydrology," said Mark Harmon, an OSU professor of forest science and the lead principal investigator.

"These properties are of high scientific and social interest and represent three different categories of ecological services from landscapes," Harmon said. "We all depend on these systems to provide clean water, timber, fish, and wildlife as well as habitat for a vast array of other species."

Since establishment of the Experimental Forest in 1948, Andrews Forest researchers have examined topics ranging from forest fire to landslides, insect biodiversity, decomposition processes, old growth ecosystems, streams and fisheries, and the impact of climate change.

Early research in the 1950s and '60s focused on the effects of logging on water, sediment and nutrients in small watersheds. From the 1970s until the present, research has emphasized basic understanding of interactions of forest and stream ecosystems, carbon dynamics and the effects of disturbances.

"Despite our decades of research on these themes, we keep finding fascinating new facets of the workings of these ecosystems," said Fred Swanson, lead research scientist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station. "Studies range in scale from daily change in stream flow to climate variations over many centuries, and from microscopic organisms to the entire Pacific Northwest region."

According to Harmon, "one of the challenges of this wealth of knowledge is to pull it all together to see how the entire system is operating." This scientific synthesis is the major challenge, but one that must be faced if we are to help develop a sustainable environmental policy, he said.

The H.J. Andrews Forest is operated collaboratively by OSU, the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S Forest Service, and the Willamette National Forest. The LTER grant provides approximately one-third of the annual research budget, and another third comes from the Forest Service for research, data management, and facilities. Grants also come from the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies to individuals and small groups of collaborators.

Research findings from the Andrews Forest are widely published, shared in many other forms and have helped guide both public understanding of forest and stream ecosystems and the policies used to manage those lands. These basic findings have been directly translated into multiple forest and stream management applications. Additional details about H. J. Andrews Long Term Ecological Research can be found at http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter.