Building bridges and dissolving conflict

When research wildlife biologist Mike Wisdom started his Forest Service career at the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range (EFR), he learned from his supervisor and mentor Jack Ward Thomas to think big. “Aspirations are really important in the beginning of any compelling, impactful research program,” Wisdom said. “Others would sometimes tell me I’m absolutely crazy. I would say OK I’m crazy, but why don’t we at least try?”

Over the years, his aspirations have paid off not only in world-class research but also in discovering the key to making conflict disappear.

Conflict is natural and sometimes unavoidable when dealing with public land management issues. For example, when he first started working at Starkey EFR in the late 1980s, Wisdom became aware that some people disagreed with the direction the Starkey team was taking.

“Starkey facilities wanted to introduce technologies like building the fence that created the big 25,000-acre area for ungulate research, and it was very controversial among a lot of the local communities. My role was to interact with scientists but also the broad spectrum of partners and local entities, as well as regional and national, who basically at that time were operating off a lot of misinformation and rumor,” Wisdom said.

So he set out to be a bridge builder and establish relationships with local, rural partners. Ever since, he and his team have been committed to a unique brand of intellectual hospitality, inviting people and groups from far and wide to come tour Starkey EFR, going into local communities and giving presentations, holding meetings, and doing news releases.

Photo Credit

Mike Wisdom

Mike Wisdom gives a tour of Starkey Experimental Forest and Range to Treasure Valley Community College students.

“One thing I have learned is never dismiss anyone. Treat everyone with respect, whatever their background, and engage them in ways that can be helpful to support research that’s truly applied research,” Wisdom said. “We are as transparent as we possibly can be. We are as inclusive as possible, in whatever phase of the scientific process people have interest in being engaged in. We honor their views and respect them, and do our best to include those views in how we think about the topics of research and the design, all the way through publications and management applications.”

One of the issues Wisdom and his team heard about from the community was contention over elk, which can cause damage to crops and private property.

Bill Richardson, senior conservation program manager at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and a longtime partner of the Starkey project, explained, “Landowners were experiencing elk depredation and were looking for ways to solve that and keep elk on public lands. That’s how the Blue Mountains Elk Initiative started. It’s now the longest running wildlife initiative at least in the country if not maybe in the world. It originated in huge conflict, and Mike was right there starting it.”

Further complicating the issue of elk management is the fact that some communities want more elk not fewer. In the early 2000s, five tribes with ceded land on national forests in western Washington expressed their concerns about the lack of early-seral vegetation, which provides high-quality, abundant nutrition for elk, a primary First Food for the tribes. Early-seral vegetation includes grasses, forbs, and shrubs, and typically can be found following disturbance, such as fire.

“The tribes were seeing declining nutritional base for elk because we don’t have active silviculture like we used to, and we’re suppressing fires,” said Wisdom.

Wisdom and PNW scientist Mary Rowland pulled together a team and compiled a lot of data, including telemetry data collected and offered by the tribes. “We had those tribal staff members as coauthors in the process, and we built evaluation models for elk nutrition and habitat use. If your objective is to have a particular healthy, vibrant population of elk for First Foods, we were able to show how to map and think about nutrition and plan for it silviculturally,” he said.

The project had a major material impact: it resulted in special elk forage establishment areas on the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest and also resulted in tribes acquiring private industrial timber lands adjacent to the national forest so they could manage for nutrition directly.

“We played a role throughout, and we focused on management applications. The key was inclusiveness and representation, which really helped provide the structure for much better discussion about what the tribes wanted from the Forest Service for management of lands. We have a website built with Region 6 [Pacific Northwest Region] that uses those results in management tools and examples for applications,” Wisdom said.

Richardson from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation appreciated the flexibility built into the elk habitat selection models. “Mike has always been really good at thinking about both sides of the equation,” he said. “A lot of the public and private landowners and even some agency folks wanted to see those models as being one-way models. But Mike had listened and understood all sides, and he said ‘Look, this model can be used either to help keep elk on the landscape, or it could be used to move elk off the landscape.’ It gives both sides.”

Leslie Naylor, a biologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) has been another long-term partner of the Starkey team. He spoke about his organization’s involvement in the Meadow Creek restoration research project, a n ambitious collaborative effort to evaluate the impacts of stream restoration on a diverse spectrum of riparian and upland responses on the Starkey EFR.

“The Meadow Creek project is a huge collaborative, and it’s working really well. A lot of its success is down to Mike getting people involved,” said Naylor. “The CTUIR has a strategic vision for both upland and river restoration, and this partnership with the Forest Service on the Meadow Creek project is the only place in the tribe’s ceded territory where we are implementing that vision together with the prospect of intensive monitoring of the effects of restoration. It’s a great project for us to be involved with.”

Naylor attributed the success of the collaboration to the Starkey team’s ability to bring people together and keep their sights on a collective vision.

“Mike is very respectful of other people, and other scientists. He’s very encompassing, very willing to work with people and listen to people and listen to what their needs are,” said Naylor. “And there’s also the realization for me that I can’t do all the research and monitoring by myself or just with my crew. We’re really good at going out and collecting the data, but we fall short of the statistical analysis and the publication side. The Forest Service has that expertise that we need. It’s very collaborative. Everyone is bringing a different skill set and working together. It’s not something one agency can do on its own.”

In an era of declining budgets and declining staff, working together can help researchers, land managers, and other partners to achieve their goals and even be aspirational. The Meadow Creek project has more than 20 partners, with a diverse range of interests and contributions.

Wisdom explained why this is so important. “If we are going to be successful in our research, we need to be reaching out to sources of expertise beyond our research station and Forest Service, Research and Development. That has been really powerful from the standpoint of leveraging the expertise, as well as demonstrating that we keep it open and honest, and we share our data and our process all along the way. All these entities have built that trust, I think that has really worked well,” he said.

The elk nutrition and habitat selection models and the Meadow Creek project are only two examples of Wisdom’s long career of thinking big. Under Wisdom’s leadership, the Starkey team has gone on to collaborate with over 80 federal, state, private, tribal, and community partners over the years.

And what about the key to making conflict disappear?

As Wisdom expressed it, “Just seeing different entities who might be acrimonious and look for conflict—when you help by sharing science information and also engage them in the process, it seems like a lot of the controversies over how to interpret our research for management applications are perceived conflicts. It’s about being sincere, respectful, honoring them, and being inclusive. When people who don’t usually talk to one another directly meet face to face and go through a discussion about what we know and don’t know, and they’re heard and respected, it’s amazing how many different controversies don’t exist.”