If a forest technician falls while hiking through a forest and no one is there to see it, does her backside still hurt?
Unequivocally, yes.
“There is no trail where we walk,” said Riley Thomas, a forestry technician in the Chugach National Forest in Alaska. “You are bushwhacking through all kinds of brush. There are a lot of tripping hazards. You’re just going to fall every now and then. You just have to laugh at yourself.”
But, she said, “It’s amazing being out in the woods where almost no one else has gone before.”
Thomas began her job shortly after graduating from UWM in May with her BS and a major in conservation and environmental science. She phoned in from her post outside of Seward, Alaska, to talk about her work, the importance of natural spaces, and why spruce bark beetles are so pesky.
You have the perfect job for someone who is interested in conservation and the outdoors. What drew you to environmental science?
I have always been really involved in the outdoors and nature. As I got older, I became more aware about problems such as climate change. I decided I wanted to put my passion to good use and do something with my interest in the outdoors to make a difference. I chose UWM for college because of the Conservation & Environmental Science program.
Tell me about the Chugach National Forest.
The Chugach National Forest is the second-largest national forest in the U.S. The first is the Tongass, which is also in Alaska. The Chugach is the northernmost temperate rainforest, which is a really neat ecosystem. There’s a lot of rain, which can be kind of gloomy, but when you learn what it does for the ecosystem and all the plants and wildlife that it provides for, it doesn’t seem so gloomy anymore.
There are 10,000 glaciers just in the forest alone. It’s a beautiful place. There are brown bears and black bears and moose. Bald eagles are super prevalent in the forest. Part of the forest is a byway for a lot of migrating birds. There’s also a cool weasel called the ermine – a very cute little weasel that turns white in the winter. Salmon are also an integral part of the forest. There’s wildlife everywhere.
What does a forestry technician do?
It really depends on the forest. I specifically am on the spruce bark beetle crew. The district that I work in has been negatively affected by spruce bark beetles. They had a population boom around 2019. Because the population boom, they’ve killed off hundreds of thousands of acres of spruce trees. Our crew goes to randomized plots that we’re going to treat or are thinking of treating. We do randomized surveys and take data on the trees –their age, their height, how big they are around.
We also take data on what kinds of plants are present in the area, and see if there’s any regeneration of trees happening there. If there’re saplings of birch or cottonwood or spruce or hemlock or any other kind of trees we have in the forest, we’re taking note of all of that. There’s also fire prevention as well. Are there a lot of grasses in the area by all these dead trees? That’s a potential fire hazard and we need to mitigate that.
What conservation work do you do with the spruces to fight back against bark beetles?
Spruces produce a mass amount of cones every five to six years. When that happened this fall, we collected cones to grow saplings to regenerate the forest with after we cut down all of the old spruces. We had climbers from Oregon to help us get cones from the branches at the top of these gigantic spruce trees and toss them down. We’re also looking at genetics to see what kind of spruce live in different areas on the Kenai Peninsula.
At the same time, we are collecting birch seeds. You collect birch seeds yearly by essentially shaking the birch tree, because their cones are filled with flaky seeds. You have a tarp underneath the trees to catch the seeds, and we’ll use those to regenerate the forests as well after we treat them for spruce bark beetle.
Between invasive species and wildfires, what do you see as the biggest hazard to the forest?
The pests that I work with are actually native! The only reason why they have had quite the population boom is climate change. Spruce bark beetles thrive in warm and dry climates. When it’s warmer and drier in the forest due to climactic changes, that means they can produce more offspring and harm more trees.
Cold ecosystems like most of Alaska are relatively fragile to any change in temperature. I think all but one of the glaciers in the forest are receding, and exceedingly fast, which can change the ecosystem very rapidly, especially when you’re removing a support on mountainsides. Then what is that rock to do? It can create landsides, which can end up being tsunamis because many of these receding glaciers are on the ocean here, which can cause a huge problem.
Those are just a few examples, but climate change is rearing its ugly head.
What can regular people like me do to help our National Parks?
Even just supporting your local county and state parks is important because a lot of funding depends on how much places are visited, and by how many people. You can volunteer. Milwaukee Riverkeeper is a great resource for cleanups on the river. I know Milwaukee County Parks has a lot of cleanup events, and every spring they have a volunteer wetland monitoring program. The Conservation Club on the UWM campus also has a lot of great resources for getting involved in conservation around the Milwaukee area.
If you’re interested in more of a nationwide or global impact, petitions are a great way to put your name on something that will help various conservation efforts. I think petitions are a great way to have a say in what is being done to the world around you. While you may feel powerless, putting your name and your zip code down on the list of folks helps more than you think.
What is one thing you want people to know about the forest?
Natural places around you are important. While the natural spaces around Milwaukee don’t exactly look like the ones in Alaska, that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate them. I think natural spaces provide a lot of services to a lot of people.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science