Fire, grazing and logging have all caused problems when they occurred in the wrong place at the wrong time for too long and too intensely. But researchers and land managers are finding that, if used strategically, these disturbances can become tools to control weeds, prevent juniper invasion and limit the extent of wildfire.
Grazing helps to shape ecosystems, but the effects depend on management and the environment.
Lisa Gaines’ grandmother made it a priority to educate her girls. “I will educate my daughters before I educate my sons,” Gaines remembers her saying. Gaines’ grandmother lived her entire life in the black community in St. Louis and saw that young men “always found a way of making it through, but women did not.”
As the daughter of a physics professor and a lawyer, Catalina Segura set her sites on working in a university. Her father was “truly excited to use science to make a difference,” she recalls. “He was very inspiring.”
To be a wildlife biologist, it helps to have skills: to climb 30 feet up a tree to reach an eagle’s nest, to monitor a tranquilized wolf before it wakes or to track a wolverine in the high country. And in years past, it would have helped to be a man.
A team of ornithologists, birders and citizen scientists is collecting data on Oregon birds through a project called Oregon 2020.