Agroborealis Research Highlights published

Read about the research conducted by Professors Meriam Karlsson and Dave Verbyla in the newest Agroborealis Research Highlights. One highlight describes greenhouse research by Karlsson — her work with bell pepper production, her analysis of the nutritional value of Alaska-grown vegetables versus those grown outside Alaska, and her studies of how different combinations of LED lights affect production.

A second highlight focuses on Dave Verbyla's remote sensing studies of changing Dall sheep habitat in Alaska, the Northwest Territories, northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. His research is part of a four-year study funded by NASA, which will consider how vegetation and snow conditions are changing in alpine ecosystems and how those changes may affect Dall sheep.

Agroborealis is the research publication of the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station and the School of Natural Resources and Extension. The publication, which was founded in 1969, became available in a new format this spring. Downloadable Highlights are published online twice yearly at www.uaf.edu/snre/agroborealis.

Agroborealis Research Highlights published this spring looked at efforts to develop an early maturing spring wheat and research on how well forest regeneration efforts worked on boreal forestlands in the Interior that were harvested between 1975 and 2004.

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SNRE says goodbye to four faculty members

The School of Natural Resources and Extension will say goodbye to four longtime faculty members at the end of this month.

They include Roxie Dinstel, the associate director of the UAF Cooperative Extension Service and the SNRE interim executive officer; Gary Kofinas, a professor of resource policy and management; State 4-H Program Leader Deb Jones; and Kari van Delden, the Extension agent in Nome.

Roxie Dinstel

Roxie Dinstel demonstrates hot water bath canning. This
photo was taken a few years ago.

Roxie Dinstel’s career with the Cooperative Extension Service began in Abilene, Texas, 41 years ago, shortly after she graduated from college with degrees in home economics and business. She worked for Extensions in Oklahoma, Montana and, for the past 22 years, Alaska. Dinstel  was the district home economist in Fairbanks until four years ago, when she became the associate director for Extension. She has also been filling in as the school’s executive officer since March.

Dinstel’s retirement plans include a 1,700-acre ranch in the southeast corner of Montana, which is within 10 miles of where her husband, Dan, grew up. They hope to raise cattle and dryland hay on the property, which is near Ridge, Montana. It’s a life she knows, since she grew up on a ranch and she and Dan have already raised cattle in Montana and Texas.

“It’s a family failing,” she joked. If all goes well with the purchase, the Dinstels will take over the ranch in April.

Dinstel said she has enjoyed Extension because it involved working with people and helping them solve problems. It is satisfying to know you really helped someone and met a need, she said. Her passions have included teaching food preservation, family and home economics and working with food businesses.

“What other career can you have that they pay you to keep learning?” she asks.

In addition to earning a master’s degree at Texas Woman’s University, she completed all the coursework for a doctorate at UAF. Her many recognitions include a Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Extension 4-H Agents and the Distinguished Service and Continuing Excellence Awards from the National Extension Association for Family and Consumer Services.

Gary Kofinas
Professor Gary Kofinas will retire from his tenured faculty position with the university at the end of the month, but he plans to continue his research through the Institute of Arctic Biology.

Gary Kofinas poses with "wünderhound Gwinzee" at Teton Pass.

Kofinas has had a split appointment with the school and IAB since 2002, but his connections with the school extend to 1989 when he taught a Summer Sessions class, a six-week field “controversial issues” course on the question of oil vs. wilderness in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The school was then known as the School of Agriculture and Land Resources Management.

A professor of resource policy and management, Kofinas has specialized in the resilience and sustainability of indigenous rural communities.

Kofinas served as director of the Resilience and Adaptation Program (RAP), a graduate program in sustainability science, from 2007 to 2010, and he coordinated the program for five years before that. He taught graduate-level natural resources management classes that were cross-listed with biology, anthropology and economics, including Local-to-Global Sustainability, Integrated Assessment and Adaptive Management, Resilience Graduate Seminar and Resilience Internship.

Kofinas received an interdisciplinary doctorate in resource management science from the University of British Columbia in 1998. His dissertation focused on community involvement in the Canadian co-management of the Porcupine caribou herd. That research involved living in rural indigenous communities of northern Canada for about a year.

Before and after receiving his doctorate, he worked as a research associate for the Institute of Arctic Biology for five years. He also worked as a research assistant professor for the Institute of Social and Economic Research at UAA. Kofinas received several awards, including the Secretary of the Interior’s Partnerships in Conservation Award for his project on the study of sharing networks to assess the vulnerability of local communities to oil and gas development in Arctic Alaska.

Kofinas now lives in Wilson, Wyoming, at the foot of the Tetons, in a home he has owned since 1988. Post retirement, he says he will work with his current graduate students, launch a scenarios project for the Teton Region and “continue his search for the perfect powder turn.”

Deb Jones
Deb Jones says she has come full circle from her start as a 4-H volunteer in Alaska to adventures with the University of New Hampshire, Virginia Tech, Utah State University, and then back to Alaska. She served as county agent, Extension specialist, state program leader and department chair.

Deb Jones with Alaska Sen. Mike Dunleavy at a breakfast
hosted by the 4-H Youth in Governance program.

Jones came to UAF in 2009 as the state 4-H program leader. Before that, she worked as a 4-H youth development specialist at Utah State University for eight years and as a 4-H agent for Virginia Cooperative Extension for eight years. She earned a doctorate at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Special areas of interest have included youth development in different cultures, afterschool and military programs, 4-H family and consumer sciences programming, and the role of spirituality in youth programs. She received the Distinguished Service and Meritorious Service Awards from the National Association of Extension 4-H Agents.

Jones says the best part of 4-H is going anywhere in the country and doing what you love, and staying in touch with Extension family. She said one of the highlights of her service in Alaska has been relationship building with partner agencies and organizations whereby each partner benefits in cost sharing to support local staffing for youth and their families. “This is something particularly important as we stay strong during these uncertain economic times,” she said.

She recently was recognized for 25 years of service with 4-H and is now exploring something new.

Kari van Delden
After 13 years as the sole Extension agent in Nome and 24 years in the community, Kari van Delden is headed to Washington state to be closer to family.

Kari van Delden

Van Delden, who has a background in childhood development, moved to Nome to direct an infant learning program for Norton Sound Health Corp. The job required more than 200 village visits to serve families with special needs children. “I just really fell in love with the region,” she says.

As a health, home and family development agent, she has offered a variety of programs, including sessions on nutrition, childhood obesity prevention, cooking, food preservation and the importance of vitamin D in the North.

Van Delden has worked closely with community groups to determine what to offer. She has trained daycare providers and provided diversity and racial equity training to many agency employees and community members. She worked with representatives from Kawerak, Inc. and a social justice task force to develop the Historic Trauma and Decolonization workshop. The training encourages participants to discuss the effects of racism, historical trauma and colonization.

“The workshop focuses on self awareness and healing,” she said.

After Van Delden and Pangaga Pungowiyi , the wellness director for Kawerak Inc., presented the training to Norton Sound Health Corp. administrators, they decided to offer it to all employees. It was also presented to community members in St. Michael and to many groups in Anchorage. She has also co-taught and trained instructors for Knowing Who You Are workshop, a racial equity workshop that was developed for people who work in the child welfare system, and Green Dot violence prevention trainings.

Van Delden received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Extension Association for Family and Consumer Sciences this past October.

Kari’s husband, Andre, retired as a high school math teacher last year. Their home will be in Concrete, Washington, a small town an hour east of Bellingham. Kari says she knows she will miss Nome terribly and plans to return to see friends.

Longtime Extension employee Kathi Tweet will continue to coordinate programming at the Nome office.

OneTree Alaska wins international birch syrup honors

Jan Dawe displays the award OneTree Alaska
received in the Birch Syrups World Challenge.

Jan Dawe and the OneTree Alaska birch sap crew won first place in an international birch syrup competition that drew entries from Alaska, Canada and Russia.

The competition, the Birch Syrups World Challenge, is coordinated by a Russian birch syrup producer Dawe met at an international birch sap and syrup conference in New York two years ago. This is the second year for the challenge.

Dawe said the syrup that was submitted was made from OneTree’s “first day reserve,” the first run of sap, which contains a little sucrose as well as glucose and the fruit sugar, fructose.

“That’s the really good stuff,” she said. Sixty-five testers in Russia judged the syrups, Dawe said. The organizer says the idea of the competition is to identify a consumer favorite. Kahiltna Birchworks in Talkeetna placed second and a Russian producer, third. The competition was this spring but Dawe only recently received the medal.

OneTree has been experimenting with different processing methods and working with individuals interested in small-scale production of birch syrup or birch sap products. Dawe is a research assistant professor who coordinates OneTree Alaska, a forest education, research and outreach program affiliated with SNRE.

Volunteers with a birch syrup cooperative and OneTree staff collected 5,300 gallons of birch sap this past spring. The volunteers received a portion of the birch syrup that was made in exchange for their labors.

Dawe and her volunteers hoped to use the rest of the birch sap concentrate, which would have boiled down to 50 gallons, to make and sell caramels and fudge to support the OneTree program. Unfortunately, that concentrate was lost in late October when the freezer failed.

“That was devastating,” said Dawe.

Instead, Dawe hopes to raise $50,000 by February to help pay for the sap season crew this spring. Toward that end, she and volunteers are selling ice luminaria for $10 each until the end of December and accepting contributions through a University of Alaska Foundation account. Anyone who is interested in ordering luminaria may call 474-5907 or email Dawe at jcdawe@alaska.edu or OneTree at alaskaonetree@alaska.edu. If you are interested in giving to OneTreeAlaska, go to the UA Foundation giving page at www.alaska.edu/foundation/ways_to_give/give-now/.

Women in Agriculture Conference focuses on leadership

Women operate nearly a third of the 3.3 million farms in the United States, and they farm more than 301 million acres.

Women in Agriculture Conference participants listen to keynote speaker
Anne Schwartz in a classroom at the UAF Murie Building.

The statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture may seem surprising to some people, but probably not to participants in the sixth-annual Women in Agriculture Conference. The videoconference event on Saturday drew more than 50 women farmers and agency representatives to three sites in Alaska. They joined about 550 participants at 37 sites in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

Alaska farmers participated at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in Delta Junction and at the Matanuska Experiment Farm in Palmer. They included part-time and full-time women farmers who raised a variety of crops and animals — peonies and other flowers, vegetables, hay, barley, oats, buffalo, cattle, horses, poultry, rabbits and dairy cows.

The conference, because of the different time zones, started early in Alaska, at 7:30 a.m. The theme was leadership. Conference chair Margaret Viebrock provided an overview of the day’s events and encouraged women to watch for a USDA agricultural census coming in December.

“Let’s stand up and be counted for what we do,” she said, adding that the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides loans and marketing programs based on that information.

Viebrock said that women have been involved in agriculture a long time. She showed photographs of women on tractors taken during a World War II-era “tractorette” training at Washington State College, which is now Washington State University, the conference host.

Keynote speaker Alexis Taylor stressed the importance of letting young people know that there are a lot of careers in agriculture — on and off the farm.

Taylor, who grew up on a corn and soybean farm in Iowa, said that experience convinced her that she did not want to farm but she has had a good career working in agriculture. She served as an executive with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and, most recently, as the director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Taylor said she benefited from mentors, and she challenged participants to get a mentor or to mentor someone. She also encouraged young women to find an agricultural internship or to ask a farmer or agency for an internship.

“We as women are natural networkers,” she said.

Taylor also encouraged participants to get involved in agricultural policy making at the community or state level. Women are underrepresented on boards and commissions that would benefit by increased diversity, she said.

The other keynote speaker, Anne Swartz, lives on a small farm in western Washington and grows vegetables and fruit. She describes herself as an activist working for the protection of soil and natural resources. She encourages activism and volunteerism at the local, state or national levels.

“My goal today is to inspire you to leave your farm a little bit,” she said. “Agriculture needs advocates.”

Several participants at the Fairbanks site were part-time farmers who hoped to become full-time after retiring from another job.

Beth Cender and her husband bought acreage near Kenny Lake in 2008 and have been raising hay and selling a variety of herbs and vegetables to area residents. Cender moved to Fairbanks for a job with the Division of Forestry but she hopes to return to Kenny Lake and farming when she retires in a few years. Her husband continues to farm on a reduced scale and she helps when she can.

Saturday was Cender’s second Women in Agriculture Conference. “It’s a way of connecting with other people interested in agriculture,” she said.

Ronda Schlumbohm, a teacher at Salcha Elementary School, was also attending the conference for the second time. She says, “I grow kids in the winter and peonies in the summer.”

She and her husband, Brian, planted 300 peony roots in 2014 and have since planted 1,700 more at their place off the Eielson Farm Road. Eventually she hopes to grow flowers full-time.

She said the conference is valuable to her because it helps her understand farming. “I think you have to get out there to figure things out,” she said.


The School of Natural Resources and Extension hosted the conference at UAF, and with Alaska Farmland Trust, at the Matanuska Experiment Farm and Extension Center. The Salcha-Delta Soil and Water Conservation District hosted the event in Delta Junction.

Reindeer Research Program trains prospective herders

Robert Wright of Tanana helps hold a reindeer Tuesday
as Erin Carr talks about using a squeeze chute to
immobilize the reindeer while weighing and giving
them medication.

The Reindeer Research Program, working with the Tanana Chiefs Conference, hosted a five-day workshop on reindeer production last week at UAF and in Delta Junction.

Program manager Greg Finstad said 10 participants attended from Fairbanks, Stevens Village, Ruby and Tanana.

Several communities are considering raising reindeer to provide food for their residents and possibly meat for sale. Finstad said the workshop was intended to help people gain knowledge and experience about reindeer and to help communities decide whether they want to raise them.

The training covered nutrition and feeding, facility design, animal husbandry, low-stress herding, handling and transport, and herd health management. The workshop combined lectures with field learning at the Reindeer Research Program’s facility at the experiment farm and the Stevens Village farm near Delta Junction, which raises bison and a few reindeer.

Tanana resident Charlie Wright participated in the training with his son, Robert. He said hopes to work with Tozitna, the village corporation in Tanana, to start a reindeer operation. He said raising reindeer could improve food security in the community and create a business that could provide year-round jobs.

“We’re really serious about it,” Wright said. He adds that the new road to the Yukon River makes the idea more feasible.

Wright notes that moose and caribou populations have decreased in recent years. “I think it’s important to have another food resource besides salmon.”

Greg Finstad talks about the veterinary care of reindeer as Robert
Wright looks on.

Ed Sarten, a natural resources specialist for Ruby tribal government, said Ruby also was interested in reindeer. Reindeer used be raised at Kokrines, which is now a ghost town upriver from Ruby, he said.

Sarten said Ruby was also interested reindeer as a source of food for the residents. At the same time, he said, “We would hope it would eventually be a business.”

On Tuesday, participants gathered at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm to see how reindeer feed is prepared. Reindeer caretaker Erin Carr explained that barley and oats are combined with canola oil to make the feed stick together and the mixture is then blended with brome hay for more fiber. Carr also displayed items for a first aid box, including hoof shears, gloves and medicines. She said it was important to get to know the reindeer so you know when they’re acting differently and are sick.

Afterward, the group met in the program’s facility and pens across from the Georgeson Botanical Garden. They got advice on herding and experience using a canvas-covered “squeeze chute” to hold the reindeer while weighing them, taking their temperature or providing medications. Students took turns holding the reindeer by their antlers in the squeeze chute as they were weighed.

The group considered a group of female reindeer, and drawing from an earlier lesson on body scoring, Finstad asked the group how they would rate a particular reindeer.

One of the trainees said, She’s definitely a 5. Nice and fat.”

The day ended with a herding activity, getting the novice herders to move reindeer from one pen to another. Finstad told the group, “This is your reindeer herd to move. Figure it out together.”

Repeatedly, the reindeer thundered past the herders until they successfully coaxed the herd into another pen and into a chute. Clearly, experience helped.

The workshop was supported by a grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Ping, Weindorf recognized by Soil Science Society

Emeritus SNRE Soils Professor Chien-Lu Ping received the Soil Science Society of America’s Presidential Award at the society’s annual meeting in Tampa, Florida.

Chien-Lu Ping poses with his award and soil society
 president Andrew Sharpley.

David Weindorf, the executive producer of a climate change documentary that highlighted Ping’s career, also received the award at the Oct. 24 ceremony. Weindorf, an associate dean at Texas Tech University, taught the arctic soils field tour (NRM 489) with Ping for several years and will help teach the course next summer.

According to the society, the award is given to persons who “have influenced soil science or the practice of soil science so greatly that the impact of their efforts will be enduring on the future of our science and/or profession.”

Ping is known internationally for his work on carbon dynamics in arctic soils. Although he retired from the university in 2015, he has continued to work with Argonne National Laboratory, studying the structure and carbon storage distribution of ice-wedge polygons. Ping will continue field research on the North Slope next summer. He also serves as the major advisor for three natural resources management graduate students.

Ping has had an eventful year. He attended the March release of the documentary “Between Earth and Sky: Climate Change in the Last Frontier” at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, D.C.  Ping said the documentary started out to chronicle the soils tour for future students and it turned into something really special, with interviews with scientists, government officials, farmers and other Alaska residents affected by climate change.

“The producer, Professor Weindorf, did a fantastic job,” he said.

The audience at the film festival was very excited about the documentary and Weindorf introduced him at the end of the showing.  The documentary includes two of Ping’s former graduate students, retired Natural Resources Conservation Service state soils scientist Mark Clark and Lorene Lynn, who has established her own environmental consulting business.

“I feel honored,” he said. “I’m really pleased to have all those years of effort recognized and to raise the awareness of others to climate change. I feel like a catalyst.”

Another notable event this year was Hurricane Irma. Ping his family live in Orlando, Florida, and weathered the hurricane fairly well with no property damage but they lost their electricity for eight days.

Ping has maintained his commitment to the advancement of science after his retirement. On the average, he says he receives dozen requests per year to review manuscripts for scientific journals. In his spare time, he paints landscapes and wildlife, including dog mushing scenes in oil, as inspired by his dog mushing experience in the Goldstream Valley.

Comprehensive agronomic crop bulletin published

The Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station published a 252-page bulletin with information about agronomic crops it tested between 1978 and 2012.

Agronomists Bob Van Veldhuizen, Mingchu Zhang and Charles Knight are the authors of AFES Bulletin 116, “Performance of Agronomic Crop Varieties in Alaska 1978-2012.” The bulletin updates AFES Bulletin 111, which was published in 2004. The new bulletin includes additional information on crops tested since 2002 and adds six new crops: quinoa, chickpeas, mustard, camelina, crambe and borage.

Other varieties tested include barley, oats, wheat, rye and triticale, wild rice, canarygrass, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, field peas, canola, flax, sunflower, safflower, meadowfoam and Jerusalem artichoke.

Zhang describes the bulletin as “a starting point for farmers to look at if they are considering growing an agronomic crop.”

The bulletin is not intended as a crop production manual, he said. Its main purpose is to provide basic information on small grain and oilseed variety testing along with information on successful cultural practices identified by the research.

Bob Van Veldhuizen said the target audience is anyone in Alaska who might be interested in growing any of the crops or varieties listed. The bulletin describes production methods on a per-acre basis but the principles can be modified for small-scale production, he said.

The bulletin also includes any analyses that were done to determine the nutritional qualities of the crops, and their suitability for animal feed or in human diets. Van Veldhuizen said that information has been requested since the first version of the bulletin came out in 2004.

Specific crops are presented in separate chapters with information on fertilization, tillage, planting, pest control, diseases, harvest, and storage, and tables that list yields, maturity and quality for all known varieties tested at each location. References and seed sources for all recommended varieties are included in separate appendices. Variety trials took place at the Fairbanks and Matanuska experiment farms, at the Eielson Agricultural Project and in the Delta Junction area.

A 48-page supplement with details about variety trials in Fairbanks, “Agronomic Crop Variety Testing in Fairbanks, Alaska 1948-2013,” has also been published. Van Veldhuizen said the supplement includes the work of agronomists prior to the beginning of the time frame of Bulletin 116, from 1948 to 1978, as well as the crops and varieties tested after 1978. Van Veldhuizen said that the goal was to compile all the lists of crops and varieties tested in Fairbanks into one publication that would be available to anyone.

Early deadline nears for Women in Ag Conference

Nov. 5 is the early registration deadline for the Women in Agriculture Conference.

Alaska's women farmers will join other farmers from Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington Nov. 18 for the sixth annual videoconference event. It will take place from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 40 locations, including sites at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in Palmer and in Delta Junction.

"We can do it!" is the theme. Washington State University, which is coordinating the conference, says it is for women farmers and anyone who works with women farmers. Agriculture students and FFA and 4-H members are also invited. Organizers describe it as an "engaging, interactive day full of inspiration, learning and networking with other women farmers."

Guest speakers will include Alexis Taylor, director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and Anne Schwartz, the owner of Blue Heron Farm in western Washington. Speakers will challenge participants to strengthen their leadership skills, become leaders in their communities, get more involved with longtime farmers and mentor new farmers. Each location will have a panel of local women farmers who will talk about the challenges they have faced and how they have used a mentor to develop skills.

The School of Natural Resources and Extension will host the event in Room 107 of the Murie Building on campus and, in conjunction with Alaska Farmland Trust, at the Matanuska Experiment Farm and Extension Center in Palmer. The Salcha-Delta Soil and Water Conservation District will host the event at the Delta Career Advancement Center in Delta Junction. Site coordinators are Meriam Karlsson at UAF, Susanna Pearlstein and Amy Pettit in Palmer and Bryce Wrigley in Delta Junction.

Early registration by Nov. 5 is $25 or $30 after that date. Agriculture students, farm interns, and FFA and 4-H youth members may register for $20. The registration fee includes a light breakfast, lunch and conference materials. See more details and online registration at www.WomenInAg.wsu.edu.

For more information about the UAF site, contact Meriam Karlsson at 907-474-7005 or mgkarlsson@alaska.edu; Susanna Pearlstein at the Matanuska Experiment Farm at 907-746-9466 or spearlstein@alaska.edu; or Bryce Wrigley in Delta Junction at 907-895-6279 or Bryce.wrigley@salchadeltaswcd.org.

Harvest Wrap-up set for Nov. 1 in Delta Junction

The annual Harvest Wrap-up meeting will take place Nov. 1 in Delta Junction.

Buckley Hollembaek is shown here in 2014 on the family farm in Delta
Junction. Edwin Remsberg photo

The gathering provides an opportunity for agricultural producers to hear about current research, share observations about the past season and help identify research needs. The UAF Cooperative Extension Service will host the meeting, which will run from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Delta Career Advancement Center.

Researchers from the School of Natural Resources and Extension and the Salcha-Delta Soil and Water Conservation District will talk about research relating to weeds and herbicides, bromegrass hay fertilizer trials, a lime study and grain variety trials. They'll also provide information about the noxious weed program.

Speakers will include Phil Kaspari, the Extension agriculture agent in Delta Junction; Meghan Lene and Vanessa Heath of the Salcha-Delta Soil and Water Conservation District; and Mingchu Zhang, Robert Van Veldhuizen and Stephen Harvey of SNRE. Harvey is a graduate student and will present on small grains.

Arthur Keyes, director of the Alaska Division of Agriculture, will also participate. Two federal officials, Lloyd Wilhelm of the Farm Service Agency and Mike Stephens of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, will provide program updates. For more information, contact the  Extension office in Delta Junction at 907-895-4215.

Alaska Invasive Species Workshop hosted in Anchorage

The invasive aquatic plant, elodea, is shown in Badger Slough in this 2010
photo. Photo by Tricia Wurtz, U.S. Forest Service

The Alaska Invasive Species Workshop, Oct. 24-26 in Anchorage, will highlight the economic and environmental risks associated with invasive species.

Tobias Schwörer, a public policy researcher from the Institute of Social and Economic Research, will kick off the annual workshop with a free public presentation on that topic at 7 p.m. Oct. 23 in the Anchorage Museum auditorium. The lecture will focus on the risks associated with the hardy invasive aquatic plant, elodea.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service and the Alaska Committee For Noxious and Invasive Pest Management will host the workshop at the Anchorage Marriott Downtown.

Workshop coordinator Gino Graziano said concern about elodea keeps coming up because of new infestations in the lakes and slow-moving waters of Interior and Southcentral Alaska. Elodea can form tangled masses that foul floatplane rudders, degrade fish habitat and make boat travel difficult.

“Floatplane operators raised the alarm on Lake Hood,” Graziano said.

Herbicide treatments have been effective in Lake Hood and other lakes, but eradicating elodea in slow-moving waters provides a greater challenge, he said. This past summer Potter Marsh and Chena Slough were treated. Graziano said the plant, which is thought to have come from aquariums or science kits, spreads easily.

The invasive species workshop brings together land managers and others involved in management, research and education efforts. Other topics will include regulations and legislation; research relating to northern pike and bird vetch; invasive slugs in the Chugach National Forest; pesticide control projects; and efforts to monitor and report invasive species.

Agenda and registration information are available at www.alaskainvasives.org. For more information, contact Graziano at 907-786-6315 or gagraziano@alaska.edu.

Forest Sports Festival draws spirited competitors

Jamie Hollingsworth looks on as competitors work the double buck saw.

The 20th annual Farthest North Forest Sports Festival got underway on a crisp Saturday morning in the fields across from the Georgeson Botanical Garden.

Fueled by doughnuts and coffee, competitors yelled encouragement to their teammates as they attempted forest feats for the first time —or sought to improve their past performances in events ranging from axe throwing to log rolling and crosscut sawing.

Eric and Stephen Nelson pose with Dave Valentine and Alice Orlich. Eric Nelson
and Orlich hold their awards as the reigning Bull and Belle of the Woods.

“You got this,” a competitor cheered on his teammates, who were trying to use a peavey, a tool with a hook, to maneuver a large log between two points successfully. Clearly, it wasn’t easy.

Forest Fest volunteer Jamie Hollingsworth explained the strategy for the double buck saw competition, which requires pulling a crosscut saw with a partner in a coordinated way. “You’re just rocking your body,” he advised a couple of competitors trying it for the first time.

Forest Fest participants included natural resources management and other UAF students and staff and members of the public trying out old-time logging sports. A smaller number participated this year, but the atmosphere remained competitive all the same. Innovations included a new birling “log,” a colorful orange and yellow plastic version borrowed by Patty Gym.

Katelyn Bushnell, a junior economics major from UAF, competed in several logging events for the first time, including birling, which involves trying to stay afloat on a log in chilly Ballaine Lake.

“I thought this would be a fun thing to do,” she said. She was looking forward to relaxing and not doing homework for a change.

Bobbi Jensen, a UAF academic advisor, participated in her second forest fest as a member of the Logger Logger team. She and Wendy Hawkins won first-place in the women’s double bucksaw event. Her favorite event involves axes, however.

Birling competitors try out the new log at Ballaine Lake.
Holding the ends of the log are Jamie
Hollingsworth and Steve Sparrow.

“I like throwing the axes,” she said. “I want to beat Victoria,” she added, joking. Victoria is Victoria Smith, a co-worker and former Belle of the Woods who ran the HooDoo half marathon this year instead of competing.

Those competing in the fire-building competition near Ballaine Lake used one log round, one axe and three matches to start a fire and bring water in a can to boil. A few drops of detergent meant the boiling water bubbled over the top of the can. This year’s winners brought their water to a boil in 11 minutes, 46 seconds.

Eric Nelson, the husband of natural resources management student Cynthia Nelson, earned the title of Bull of the Woods and NRM graduate student Alice Orlich was named Belle of the Woods for the fourth time. Nelson is a Department of Transportation camp foreman in Nenana and Orlich is finishing a master’s degree this semester.

Volunteers helping out at the event included members of the student Resource Management Society, current and retired faculty and staff of SNRE and of the Bonana Creek Long-Term Ecological Research program.

And the winners are ….

Belle of the Woods (overall female winner): Alice Orlich

Bull of the Woods (overall male winner): Eric Nelson

Team winners
First: Stihl, with members Gabriel Smith, Dawson Foster, Cy Conrad, John Shank, Coleman Smith and Ana Rodriguez
Second: Logger Logger
Third: Rifle Plus Few  

Axe throw (female): Alice Orlich

Birling (female): Alice Orlich

Birling (male): Gabriel Smith

Birling overall: Gabriel Smith

Cy Conrad fans the flames of the fire he started with his teammate, Dan.

Bow saw (female): Wendy Hawkins

Bow saw (male): Dawson Foster

Double buck saw (female): Wendy Hawkins and Bobbi Jensen

Double buck saw (male): Gabriel Smith and Dawson Foster

Double buck saw (Jack & Jill): Brooks Lawler and Cy Conrad

Fire building: Cy Conrad and Dan

Pulp toss (four-person team): Stihl

Log rolling (male): John Shank and Coleman Smith

Log rolling (female): Faith Stemmler and Danielle Siegert

Log rolling (Jack and Jill): Jason Theis and Bobbi Jensen

Axe throw (male): Eric Nelson

20th annual Forest Sports Festival set for Oct. 7

Competitors struggle to keep their balance during the 2016  birling
competition at Ballaine Lake as Mingchu Zhang looks on.

Aspiring lumberjacks and adventurous spirits may test their skills Saturday, Oct. 7,  during the 20th annual Farthest North Forest Sports Festival at UAF.

Jason Buist, left, and Pete Buist try to rev up their fire during
the 2016 fire-building competition. The longtime contenders
compete part of the "Old Growth" team.

Students and community members 18 and older are invited to try their hand at old-time forest sports such as ax throwing, log rolling, bow saw and crosscut sawing, campfire building, and birling, which involves staying upright on a floating log. No previous experience is necessary,  just a sense of humor. People may compete as individuals or as teams of four to six. At the end of the day, awards will go to the top team and to the top individual contenders — the belle and bull of the woods.

The competition begins at 10 a.m. at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm fields, across from the Georgeson Botanical Garden. At 1 p.m., the games move to Ballaine Lake. A warming fire and hot drinks will be available at the lake. Participants are advised to dress warmly. If competing in the birling, a towel and change of clothes are recommended.

The free event is hosted by the School of Natural Resources and Extension and the student Resource Management Society. The competition was developed in 1998 as a way to commemorate old-fashioned logging sports, raise awareness of the natural resources management programs at UAF and have fun. For more information, contact David Valentine at dvalentine@alaska.edu or 907-474-7614.

Alaska climate change documentary to air in the state

Chien-Lu Ping works with students in his 2015 Arctic soils field tour.
Texas Tech Public Media photo

Free screenings of a new documentary that highlights climate change in Alaska will be offered Sept. 27-30 in Fairbanks, Palmer, Anchorage and Kotzebue.

“Between Earth and Sky: Climate Change on the Last Frontier” will be shown in Kotzebue Sept. 27, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Sept. 28, in Anchorage Sept. 29 and in Palmer Sept. 30.

Texas Tech Public Media produced the documentary, which was released in March and has been shown at environmental film festivals, more than a dozen universities in the Lower 48 and in Europe and on public broadcasting stations.

Katey Walter Anthony and her husband, Peter Anthony ignite methane
on a frozen lake. Texas Tech Public Media

The documentary mixes interviews with Alaska scientists and climate change experts with the stories of Alaska residents affected by climate change. Scenic footage from across the state provides a backdrop as people talk about the shifting route for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, receding glaciers, coastal storms and erosion, wildfires and melting permafrost.

Executive producer David Weindorf said the movie was inspired by now-retired University of Alaska Fairbanks soils scientist Chien-Lu Ping and his 33 years of soils research. Ping started an annual Arctic soils field tour in 1989 and his last field trip, in 2015, was documented by the film crew.

Weindorf, a soil scientist and associate dean of research at Texas Tech University, participated in the tour with his students for more than 10 years — and will help teach the class next year. He said the field trip attracted students and scientists from Italy, Japan and across the U.S. who wanted to learn from the soil scientist. Ping also worked with scientists around the world.

“What an international impact Chien-Lu has had,” Weindorf said. “He brought all of those people together.”

Weindorf said Ping’s work was invaluable in defining a new soil order (Gelisols), methods for testing Arctic soils, and he identified many unique features of Arctic soils, including the high percentage of carbon in the soils. Weindorf said that’s important because 40 percent of the world’s carbon is tied up in subarctic and Arctic soils, and as temperatures warm, soils release carbon into the atmosphere, which contributes to the warming.

Weindorf has produced a second documentary that focused exclusively on Ping and on the field tour. “Between Earth and Sky:, An Arctic Soils Perspective” is a more technical film and geared more to students in soils and environmental sciences.

The climate change movie will be shown at 7 p.m. Sept. 27 at the Northwest Arctic Heritage Center in Kotzebue; at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 28 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Murie auditorium; at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 29 at the Bear Tooth Theatre in Anchorage; and at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at the Glen Massey Theater in Palmer. Weindorf will be at all the screenings and he will answer questions following the shows, joined in some locations by other scientists.

The documentary was directed by Paul Allen Hunton, the general manager of a Texas public television station, who has won three Emmys for his work as a documentary filmmaker.

It is funded by the USDA National Resources Conservation Service, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Texas Tech Public Media, Soil Science Society of America and the BL Allen Endowment in Pedology. The Fairbanks showing is sponsored by the UAF student group, the Resource Management Society. More information is available on the film’s website, http://betweenearthandskymovie.com/.

Forest regeneration project of 30 years yields results

Looking southeast, this photo shows part of a regeneration treatment research
area in the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest in 1986, one year after the
 treatment and three years after the area was burned in the Rosie Creek Fire.
Roseanne Densmore photo

A spruce forest regeneration experiment in Interior Alaska that spanned nearly 30 years demonstrates which forest management practices produce the best results.

The experiment, launched by three Fairbanks scientists, looked at different combinations of ground treatments to reduce competition from other vegetation and of regeneration methods, such as planting spruce seedlings and broadcast seeding.

The results, published Aug. 19 in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, showed that planting white spruce seedlings is the best way to produce a spruce-dominated stand after 28 years. Broadcast seeding was the next most effective method. The two options were the most expensive among those tested.

The rectangular plots of dark green vegetation in this 2014 aerial photograph
 show white spruce thriving in the regeneration test area. Photo by Ryan Jess

University of Alaska Fairbanks forest ecologist Glenn Juday, who helped establish the experiment in the mid-1980s and is a co-author on the paper, said the recent research shows the environmental and management situations in which different techniques work best and the situations in which they are unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Juday was a young professor in 1983 when fire swept through the Tanana Valley State Forest southwest of Fairbanks, burning 8,600 acres. The Rosie Creek Fire, whipped by wind, burned into a section of the forest known as the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest.

Juday and two other scientists, John Zasada and Roseann Densmore, realized that the fire provided a perfect setting for a forest regeneration experiment. They wanted a controlled set of experiments to test which methods worked best to establish white spruce.

White spruce is the Interior's most valuable commercial species but also the most difficult to re-establish, said Juday. Other species, such as birch, establish or resprout readily, grow faster and compete with spruce.

“Regenerating white spruce is our biggest challenge,” he said.

The researchers established a 66-acre treatment area in 1985. The plots received four different types of ground treatments to reduce competing vegetation and five different white spruce regeneration treatments, including planting seedlings and broadcast seeding. Some control plots were left to regenerate naturally.

Andrew Allaby is shown here in the field. Allaby worked
with Juday to follow-up on the regeneration project.

Results from the research were published in a 1999 article that concluded adequate numbers of spruce were established in most treatments. But in 2010, Juday took an aerial photograph that showed much more definitively how the treatments had worked.

“After another decade, it was a lot more obvious who the winners and losers were,” he said.

It was time to revisit the experimental area, now known as the Rosie Creek Fire Tree Regeneration Installation. With the help of an assistant, Juday located nearly all of original metal corner posts of 180 plots, which ranged from 40 by 40 meters to 40 by 60 meters.

In 2013 and 2014, while earning a master’s degree in natural resources management, Andrew Allaby worked with Juday to design a project that would re-examine the type of trees and the total growth in the plots.

Allaby sampled the trees on 135 of the plots, measuring about 10 percent of the trees in each, and he measured all trees in six plots to check the sampling system. Allaby analyzed the total biomass, stand density and basal area, which is a cross-section of the surface area of a stump if the tree was cut at chest height. Brian Young, who worked for the Division of Forestry and had just completed his doctorate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, helped with the analysis of the data and on the paper.

Their research shows that white spruce basal area in the planted seedling plots was six times greater than in the naturally regenerated plots, and the number of white spruce stems in broadcast-seeded plots was three times greater.

Juday said that when the regeneration experiment began, the production of new stands of large white spruce was the goal almost exclusively. Now some forest landowners want wood of any type for biomass energy and the regeneration installation provided useful information about other trees.

A disk trencher removes vegetation in the slope unit in 1985.

The ground treatments did not have a significant effect on the spruce regeneration but it did encourage an increase in the size and density of birch trees. The researchers also found differences between which regeneration practices worked best on the upland slopes and the ridgeline. The distance from unburned seed sources also made a difference.

Juday is excited about the research, which was supported by a state capital appropriation. Overall, the study is one more important piece of information that shows the state’s reforestation practices are working, he said. The Alaska Constitution calls for sustained yield on forestlands. Now this study and a recent long-term study by another graduate student, Miho Morimoto, have directly examined the regeneration of harvested forestlands.

“We’ve got much more evidence now that the regeneration practices have worked,” Juday said.

As part of timber sales, the Division of Forestry evaluates each site and prescribes different regeneration techniques, based the topography of an area, the distance from seed sources and other considerations. Some of the more successful regeneration treatments examined in the study, including ground treatments, broadcast seeding and planting seedings, are among the treatments required by the state, said Juday.

A science and technical committee established by the Division of Forestry used the new information and research from the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research site to revise state reforestation standards.

Allaby, the lead author on the paper, received his master’s degree in 2016 and works for the Division of Forestry. Young, who earned his doctorate in natural resources management in 2013, is an assistant professor at Landmark College in Vermont. Juday retired from the university in 2014 but continues with his research.