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Dear Northwest Chapter Members,
I trust that many of you are in the midst of the summer season of restoration, putting into action the theme of our recent conference on Monitoring Ecological Restoration. As Michael Hughes, our Program Vice President, put it in his summary of the conference, Ecological Restoration has established itself in most disciplines of natural resource management, which was evident in the broad participation on restoration themes at our conference. I am most excited about the feedback we received from conference participants on how we can improve our support for restoration practitioners in the Northwest and strengthen our community. With those goals in mind, we are improving our communication tools to connect you with resources and develop partnerships for workshops and continuing education. All of this is only possible with a strong team of volunteers and I am excited to welcome our new board members and volunteers, who will keep our facebook page and website fresh. Please forward any important announcements to our strategic communications team at sernw20@gmail.com.
We are also working on connecting you with the larger community of restoration practitioners in North America. As part of restructuring SER International, we are participating in the North American Coordinating Body, which will develop a North American conference with focus on Ecological Restoration, and will help chapters to collaborate in bringing benefits, such as webinars, to you. We are already communicating with the Western Canada and Rocky Mountain Chapters of SER on collaborating for our 2018 Regional Conference, with a location in the eastern part of our chapter.
As restoration practitioners we know that projects often depend on collaboration to be successful. We strongly encourage you to participate in organizing our conference and exchange your knowledge and experience with other restoration practitioners. Having been intimately involved with developing our past two conferences, I can assure you that it is a valuable experience to work with talented volunteers and strengthen our community of professionals in the field of ecological restoration.
As your Chapter’s representatives, we welcome comments to make sure SERNW provides you the benefits that you expect from your membership and promote your work through newsletter publications, conferences, and continuing education. Please share you thoughts and concerns with any of the board members. If you would like to direct your feedback directly to me, please email me at rolfgersonde@gmail.com.
Rolf Gersonde
President SERNW
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Are you interested in promoting the practice and science of Ecological Restoration?
Join SERNW BOARD COMMITTEES!
- Strategic Communications
- Restoration Highlights
- Programs
- Grants
The Board of Directors meets monthly via teleconference, and any member may attend. Help us plan our annual Member meeting, Chapter field trips or webinars, and help us keep content current on our website and Facebook page! Contact sernw@ser.org or sernw20@gmail.com , or any of our Board members through our SERNW webpage . |
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Welcome new Board members!
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Director at Large, Position 3: Jalene Littlejohn
We are greatly pleased to have Jalene as part of the SERNW Board, continuing her work on the Strategic Communications Committee, helping with Facebook and our website. Jalene may be reached at Jalenelittlejohn@littlejohnenvironmental.com.
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Director at Large, Position 4: Rodney Pond
SERNW feels lucky that Rodney will offer his talents keeping us current in social media, and will be helping with SERNW's collaboration with University of
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Washington Botanic Gardens and Department of Horticulture for a Professional Certification program. Rodney may be reached at Rodney.pond@gmail.com. (or through our facebook page)
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Director at Large, Position 5: Laura Porter
We are pleased Laura answered the call to serve on the Board following her participation with our previous two conferences! Laura will continue to help with SERNW programs and creating engaging events for SERNW members. Laura may be reached at: porterL@cleanwaterservices.org
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Submitted by Christine Mcmanamen, UM-SER Chapter
UM – SER was excited to send five undergraduate students to the SER-NW regional conference in April 2016. We all had a blast, learned a lot, and networked with professionals and students while at the conference. A couple of us even went on a field trip on Friday where we learned about wetland restoration projects in the Portland area. We also learned a lot about managing a native plant greenhouse on campus from members of the UW student chapter who were at the conference.
Back in Montana, many of our student chapter members were busy this past semester designing and hosting local restoration volunteer projects through the capstone course series (a part of UM's ecological restoration program). Through those students we were able to connect a lot of members with opportunities to work on restoration projects with partners like Five Valleys Land Trust and Trout Unlimited.
We have also kept up our work at the UM-SER run native plant garden on campus. We worked with a graduate-level ethno-botany class to grow native plants for our annual native plant sale and for out-planting in several locations around the UM campus. We are hoping to keep up and expand our relationship with similar classes to give more students the chance to intimately work with native plants.
Finally, UM – SER elected a new set of officers who will take over at the beginning of this FALL semester. I'm excited to see what this bunch of restoration enthusiasts accomplishes with UM-SER.
Contact the UM-SER Officers at:
umt.restoration@gmail.com
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Restoration (P)FESTS –
a new framework for practice and research
Guest Article
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Restoration (P)FESTS – a new framework for practice and research
Article by Zbigniew J. Grabowski1, Marissa Matsler2, Sarah Kidd3, Ashlie Denton4, Mary Ann Rozance2
1Department of Geography, School of the Environment, Portland State University
2Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, CUPA, Portland State University
3Department of Environmental Science, School of the Environment, Portland State University
4Hatfield School of Government, College of Urban and Public Affairs, Portland State University
As an interdisciplinary group of academics involved in ‘live’ restoration projects, we have seen that a need exists to integrate disparate research on forces affecting ecosystems with restoration practice. Additionally, we wish to overcome the gap between the academic knowledge base and the restoration practitioner community in order to improve knowledge transfer and avoid the creation of ‘un-grounded’ academic critiques of restoration practice. Overall, we see a need to modify restoration programs to better match landscape and hydroscape ‘reality,’ as well as produce academic research more engaged with the practitioner community. Ideally, such engagement would enable us to create a more productive ideal of restoration practice, with which we can win more political support for restoration programs, improving ongoing collaborative planning and management activities necessary for successful restoration programs.
Why a Political Financial Ecological Social and Technological System?
To promote this overall agenda, we have developed a conceptual framework which explicitly integrates restoration into a larger Political, Financial, Ecological, Social and Technological System (PFESTS). This conceptual framework draws upon three main bodies of theory: one, the large body of work on Socio-Ecological Systems which investigates the inseparability of social practice and ecological reality, two, the literature on socio-nature and political ecology which examines how various concepts, constructs and discourses become politically enacted to inform land use management restoration theory and practice, and thirdly, research on socio-technical assemblages, which examines how systems formed by the relationships between humans and the technical objects they have created, modify and represent material and social phenomena, thus affecting human perception, behavior and the imagination of future possibilities.
How have we applied a PFESTs framing to our own research?
Much of our work has been centered in the Youngs Bay area at the mouth of the Columbia River, where in the wake of extensive diking and damming projects focused on resource extraction in the region, restoration policy has responded by allocating millions of dollars to restoring a “pristine” or “pre-human” state. These restoration goals ignore the long history of Native American management in the Pacific Northwest, the social and ecological transformation in the region, and the ongoing changes that are likely to occur as climate change and development continue to impact the area. The politics and financing of the regional multi-million dollar restoration economy have also created a highly political and competitive planning arena in which restoration practitioners vie for both funding and project sites. The political distrust and competition created has led to a piecemeal rather than comprehensive approach to restoration planning. Intervention will be necessary to achieve the longer-term coordinated planning and adaptive management that is necessary for system restoration. Meanwhile human technologies, both large (the Columbia River Hydro-electric and transportation system) and small (the creation of piece meal monitoring programs and the use of heavy machinery) continue to simultaneously constrain and transform restoration practice. Restoration practitioners themselves enact projects in accordance with their socialized worldviews on what they consider appropriate levels of human intervention in natural systems to restore them. Differing views of how human-nature interactions should work (i.e. socially-mediated knowledge claims) permeate and influence technical decisions made on-the-ground.
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F- Financial-- sources and types of funding, economic structures altering system condition, relationship to macro-economic forces
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P - Political -- the structure of the decision making arena, how contestation is settled and how power is enacted
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E- Ecological-- ecosystem form and functioning both with and without human involvement
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S- Social-- the distribution and utilization of specific types of expertise, values, and visions of how to manage the system
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T- Technological-- tools, options and information management, including technologies of monitoring and representing the rest of the system
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In our more general research we have uncovered three distinct worldviews present in the SER community: 1) a pragmatic approach viewing restoration as providing ecological and social services, 2) a managerial approach which sees no separation between humans and nature, requiring ongoing engagement with sites at which the restoration process is never “done”, and 3) a purist approach viewing humans solely as a disturbance in nature to be removed as quickly as possible from all restoration sites. These different modalities have consequences for both how SER members mobilize politically in order to secure financing for ecological restoration projects, and how SER as an organization works to standardize the practices of restoration through certification and training programs.
What does the future hold?
At the present time, our use of a PFESTS framework presents many more questions than answers for the future of our collaborative research praxis. In the interim, we hope to use it to ground our research and strategically engage with other actors pursuing a restoration agenda. We also wish to invigorate dialogue around the ultimate goals of restoration, as well as facilitate understanding of the political and financial forces transforming the places we work, hopefully through the SER and other ‘pracademic’ forums.
Practical and technical questions also arise from the PFESTS framework. Where does what type of restoration fit? What political, financial, ecological, social and technological trajectories influence the ecosystem we hope to restore? At what temporal and spatial scale? How can we guide strategic alliances between restorationists and others with a stake in the future of the places where they live, work and play? These questions and many more we hope will guide not only our academic careers, but our work on the ground. We hope to see you there.
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SERNW MEMBERS- RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP!
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WORK OF COASTAL WATERSHED INSTITUTE IN ELWHA RESTORATION
FEATURED BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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The nearshore ecosystem restoration associated with large scale dam removals and the work of 2013 SERNW Conservationist of the Year Anne Shaffer and the non-profit she heads, Coast Watershed Institute (CWI) was recently featured in National Geographic via an online video by Jason Jaacks and article by Brian Howard. (Elwha Dam Removal-National Geographic )The online article and video has received over 9 million views since it aired at the beginning of June 2016.
The article highlights recovery and restoration of the nearshore at the mouth and adjacent shoreline reaches of the Elwha River. When the dam removals were planned, so much was unknown about the real outcomes of the many millions of cubic feet of sediment released by the dam removal. The host of species and organisms’ quick and enthusiastic return to the river have resoundingly answered the question. We’ve been able to watch this thru CWI’s work with local community and regional scientists dedicated to documenting the ecosystem changes following dam removal to the sediment-starved mouth of the river. Work has included long term beach seining, forage fish surveys, and beach sediment mapping , and those captivating ‘Roorda photos’ CWI posts monthly. The work has documented returning species such euchalon (Thaleichthys pacificus), a federally listed river spawning smelt, which has been nearly absent from the estuary for the past six decades. Surf smelt have also been documented to spawn on new beaches recently created as a result of dam removal. (http://www.coastalwatershedinstitute.org/blog/)
CWI is partnering with a number of agencies and educational institutions to get this important work done of documenting the restoration of the Elwha ecosystem. SERNW offers congratulations to Anne, CWI, Jason Jaacks and Brian Howard on the recent National Geographic article! The acknowledgement and interest show how significant this work has been, not just regionally, but to the entire nation.
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Elwha nearshore 11 July 2016. Tom Roorda and CWI. All rights reserved.
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Upcoming Conferences & Workshops
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EcoUnite Annual Family Picnic and BBQ, August 25th, 5-8pm,
Saturday, August 27, 2016, 4:30-8:30 pm, Benton Co Fairgrounds, Corvallis OR
September 10-October 1, Saturdays, 9:30-11:30 am, Portland OR
2017 NATIONAL NATIVE SEED CONFERENCE
October 19-20, 2016, Monarch Hotel, Clackamas, OR
November 3, 2016, Medford OR
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SHARE YOUR CASE STUDY SUMMARIES, STUDENT PROJECTS, AND RESTORATION UPDATES!
Let SERNW provide a venue for sharing your work and methods of ecological restoration with other members and practitioners in our region. Whether you are a private consulting firm, student, or agency professional, we welcome the opportunity to include information about projects you and others have done in our online Restoration Highlights feature. Please take the time to let us know about projects in which you are involved, or seen, in your community. We are looking for short, informal, informative articles and pictures are always welcome.
We probably learn most from projects with elements that have not met our expectations. So do not hesitate to let us know what you would do differently or that would improve the success of your projects. Submit your articles or ideas for articles, see our publishing guidelines, and see the latest restoration project summaries at: Restoration Highlights. We look forward to hearing from you.
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Connect with us!
Keep up with our latest happenings on SERNW's Facebook page! Like us at SERNW! Any member can share items of interest on Facebook or you can submit topics to SERNW20@gmail.com.
Your Strategic Communication Team,
Allison Warner, Rory Denovan, Rodney Pond and Jalene Littlejohn
P.S. Don’t forget to renew your membership on the SERNW webpage....
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