TIME TRAVEL: 'THINKING ALOUD' ABOUT RECOVERY RATES, RESILIENCE, AND PERSISTENCE ALONG DEBRIS FLOW TRACKS OVER TWO DECADES OF CHANGE DETECTION IN THE WILLAMETTE NATIONAL FOREST

Time Travel requires careful observation as participants view sets of stream scenes taken at five year intervals over a twenty year time span (i.e., Time Travel), and then rank the recovery of debris flow tracks by considering their resilience and persistence.

The hand-held, channel-based, repeat photography focuses on several first and second order streams affected by debris flows in the Cascade Mountains of Western Oregon. Specifically chosen to depict diverse conditions, Time Travel blends passive lecture and active participation modes by showing pairs of erosional and depositional reaches for several forested stream channel corridors subject to debris flows since the 1950s.

Ultimately, Time Travel is intended to spark consideration of resilience and persistence as useful (or useless) concepts for describing ecological consequences, successional pathways, or recovery trajectories in relevant or meaningful ways. In the context of Time Travel, resilience is the ability of an ecosystem to recover from perturbation. Persistence is the ability of an ecosystem to undergo natural successional processes, or the continuance of an effect after the cause of perturbation is removed, all without active human management.