ROLES OF GEOSCIENCES IN MANAGEMENT OF WESTERN U.S. PUBLIC FOREST LANDS

The diverse roles of the geosciences and geoscienitsts in policy and management of public forest lands in the western U.S. have shifted dramatically over recent decades, during a period of increasingly complex and contentious issues. In the 1960s through 1980s geoscientists principally assisted with extraction of wood and mineral resources. Since the late 1980s the diversity of roles of agency, academic, and interest group geoscientists has grown and become particularly evident in the contexts of land use conflicts and bioregional planning. Through watershed analysis and restoration planning, the geosciences have become central to development of more integrated approaches to forest landscape and watershed management. A sustained, adaptive, integrated approach to land management is particularly critical as public and political attention shifts abruptly from one issue to another -- commodity production, species protection, water supply quantity and quality, wildfire hazard, public safety in the face of floods and debris flows. Geoscientists bring broad geographic and long-term perspectives to the task of land management and provide useful, specific knowledge concerning topics such as routing of water, sediment, and wood through drainage basins; controls of landforms on disturbance regimes; and the parallels between biotic succession and succession of geophysical processes after severe landscape disturbance. These broad-scale views are critical to natural resource policy, given the importance of gradual, protracted ecological and geophysical change and of abrupt, episodic disturbance by fire, flood, land use practices, and other processes.