Asking Expansive QuestionsFulfilling the land grant mission one puzzle piece at a time.

Paper crinkles as Vanessa Schroeder unfolds a large map across the back of a dusty utility vehicle. Surrounded by an arid expanse of sagebrush, juniper and aspen on the western slope of massive Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon, she traces a finger along her team’s route for the day. She describes her plan to a group of scientists, landowners and public land managers, most affiliated in some way with Oregon State.

All of them seek information to help manage public lands in ways that benefit ranchers and their livestock, protect wildlife and preserve the complex ecosystems of the region. In this case they’re particularly interested in whether removing juniper from aspen stands benefits key species and, if not, what are the trade-offs?

Schroeder is an OSU faculty research assistant in rangeland science with the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center (EOARC) in Burns, population 2,800, about 260 highway miles east of Corvallis. To get to the research site from Burns, one drives an hour south to the hamlet of Frenchglen, bumps along a gravel road for half an hour and boards a utility vehicle for a two-hour, teeth-rattling ride along a rutted track.

It’s late October, which means snow might make this the last visit until spring thaw because it’s hard enough to get to the site without snow. “One of the challenges is accessing the study sites because, believe it or not, this is actually a good two-track road,” said Schroeder.

Steens Mountain is a fault block, an uplifted slab of a mountain reaching 9,700 feet in Harney County. Harney is Oregon’s largest county, encompassing 10,226 square miles, about the size of Maryland. It’s home to an estimated 500 ranches and farms, and 75% of the land is managed by the federal government. Cattle and calves are Oregon’s second largest agricultural commodity, with production valued at $652 million in 2018. The livelihood of the cattle ranches and much of eastern Oregon’s economy depends upon sustainable grazing on public lands, and therefore upon healthy ecosystems.

Research in the realm of science-meets-ecology-and-economy is central to much of OSU’s mission as Oregon’s land grant university. Projects like this occur across the state in forestry, fisheries, public health and agriculture, with an army of OSU-trained and/or affiliated scientists playing key roles.

This day’s trip — aimed at building an understanding of how deer and bird populations might be affected if humans remove water-hogging juniper trees from aspen stands — epitomizes the work of the EOARC, a collaboration between the OSU Extension Service and the federal Department of Agriculture. Schroeder and her colleagues seek pieces of an often-confounding puzzle of how different parts of the ecosystem interact.

While the approaches Schroeder and her colleagues take might be new, the overall effort isn’t. For decades researchers, ranchers and public land managers have worked together to answer key questions, and over time they’ve found some general truths. “It’s more of a sage-grouse term but there is a phrase, ‘What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,'” Schroeder said. “So often you find that what is good for wildlife is also going to be good for a rancher.”

“That’s because no one wants to have pasture or rangeland that is complete annual grasses or a dense, juniper-encroached area that has choked out all sagebrush and all grass.”

“It’s not going to be beneficial for (ranchers) if they don’t have forage for their cows and it’s not beneficial if they don’t have an ecosystem that is resilient.”

Researchers are convinced that juniper trees have encroached upon some areas due to human interventions, including decades of fire suppression and historical grazing practices.

It’s more of a sage-grouse term but there is a phrase, ‘What’s good for the bird is good for the herd.’ So often you find that what is good for wildlife is also going to be good for a rancher.

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“We identified several aspen stands in the area that had been encroached by juniper at different rates,” said Holly Higgins ’11, a Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist whose expertise and support are critical to the success of the project. Researchers found “some fairly new encroachment with small trees, and some (areas) have been encroached upon to the point where we couldn’t find a living aspen in there. We found shells, snags, and places where aspen had died. The juniper had gotten so thick the aspen were no longer even surviving.”

Local mule deer populations are declining and researchers want to know why. Some bird species appear to avoid encroached areas, and researchers think that’s because juniper can serve as a roost for larger predatory birds.

“Some folks call (juniper) a native invasive,” Schroeder said. “We’d like to see it at the levels of pre-European settlement, where it was more limited to rocky outcrops and not encroaching into grasslands and shrublands.”

It seems logical that removing some juniper trees will make key rangeland areas more diverse and healthy, and therefore better for species such as deer, birds and aspen. But no one is sure what the unintended consequences might be.

To try to figure this out, the team will use motion-sensor cameras to monitor deer and automatic audio recorders to identify songbirds. In the spring, they’ll return before the juniper are removed and install their equipment. The photos and recordings will provide a digital guestbook signed by individual animals as they visit the aspen stands. This should give Schroeder and the others a much better idea of which species are using the stands, for what and when. Then they’ll compare previously known and new information to assemble a piece of the intricate puzzle of multi-species interactions. After six years of similar field trips and patient, targeted research, they expect to be better able to provide science-based land management recommendations.

“We just want to have the full picture when we are doing land management,” said Schroeder, “so that we are not unintentionally harming one species to help the other.”