On a perfect June evening, I had the privilege of joining the third and final cohort of the Silvicultural Application of Minnesota’s Ecological Classification Systems course for their graduation celebration. 
Funded through VFVC with a grant to the Sustainable Forest Education Cooperative (SFEC), the course has been ably developed and led by University of Minnesota Education Specialist Louise Levy. Louise has pulled together a uniquely qualified team of leading professionals to design and deliver the course, including Aitkin County Assistant Land Commissioner Beth Jacqmain, John Almendinger, Alaina Berger and Dan Hanson from the DNR, UPM Forester Cheryl Adams and Julie Ernst from UMD. Along with curriculum development efforts at Itasca and Vermillion community colleges, the course is part of a broader VFVC objective to establish ecologically-based forest management as the norm in Minnesota.
In the picnic shelter at the Forest History Center in Grand Rapids, over celebratory steaks and beer, Louise handed out handsomely bound certificates to the 20 or so natural resource professionals including folks from the DNR, St. Louis County, BIA, and three college professors. Every graduate also received a pocket-sized compass mounted in a beautifully carved wooden bob, engraved with the words of Francis Scott Bacon, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
Designed to facilitate the application of John Almendinger’s native plant community classification system to silviculture and stewardship planning, the course demands an impressive command of plants. Students were given tough assignments and then grilled. One test involved identifying 58 plant specimens – without flowers. ICC Forestry Instructor Harry Hutchins spoke up to say it was very helpful to have learned how to identify plants by other structures, because flowers are so temporal and fleeting. John Kotar, University of WI Professor and author of Approaches to Ecologically Based Forest Management on Private Lands was movingly eloquent about the satisfaction of knowing plants and of how unsettling it is for him to experience “blank spots” of knowledge about plants when he’s in the woods. He likes to know what things are and says his approach is to learn two new plants a day. “You do the math,” he said with satisfaction, “Just imagine how many plants you can learn in a year or ten years.”
I overheard one student say that the interagency composition of the group enriched her learning experience. “We need a whole day for arguing”, someone joked.
Louise thinks ecological classification systems offer a conceptual framework for what people already know intuitively about the woods and natural processes. One student said he liked the tool because it helps better inform decisions, but doesn’t dictate them.
This ECS course, along with curriculum developed at Itasca Community College and Vermillion Community college, are outcomes of an effort to improve the business success and best practices of the people who manage and harvest the forest. With certificates in the hands of the 20 graduates of the final training group, the work plan of this 2004 Blandin Foundation grant to the SFEC is completed.
In the coming months, Louise and I will be working with our ICC and VCC colleagues, evaluators and some of you among our blog readers to think about next steps for all three of these efforts. We will use this space to share the results of the course evaluation Louise has conducted, and of the stories we will collect about how participants turn their learning into practice, and with what result. For now, I invite you to submit your comments and read a publication we put out in 2006, From Theory to Practice: Ecological Classification System Principles provide a holistic approach to forest management
July 3, 2007 at 8:28 am
Now the graduates will go back to their revenue driven public and private enterprises to face the same old incentives and to skeptical peers. Without addressing the agriculture model of forest management these new generation timber sale planners will just know more about the ecological damage their employer’s mandates create. It is disapointing but not surprising that the Blandin Foundation is avoiding addressing the root cause of the forest biodiversity crisis.
Meanwhile the programs and networks created by this Blandin program are used by the timber lobby to block reform, gain public subsidies and aggregate NIPF suppliers into a lower cost fiber source.
July 3, 2007 at 2:10 pm
I am pleased that the Blandin Foundation has supported training in Minnesota’s Ecological Classification System. I think it is imperative that all who own or manage land have an ecological understanding of the natural resources and natural systems found there.
My only question is that it sounds like with a single “class” of twenty graduates, the funding is at an end? Time to re-fund to train hundreds more!
July 9, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Congratulations are due to the foundation as well as Louise, Beth, John, and the many others who have worked so hard on this program. I hope we’ll see more opportunities for professional foresters (and others) to deepen their knowledge about applied forest ecology. This approach can improve productivity and also increase public acceptance of forest management.
Congratulations also to the many folks who have completed the program. This is great stuff.
July 10, 2007 at 8:29 am
(This is a report sent June 28 to the 60 course trainees.)
Greetings!
I’m just back from Vancouver, British Columbia, where I presented a talk on our Ecosystem Silviculture course at the 6th North American Forest Ecology Workshop. The audience included our own Kurt Rusterholz, MN DNR Ecological Services, as well as individuals from around the country.
The talk was in a session titled “Ecological Classification” and
included three other presentations, two at the half-continent
scale, and the other at the local site level scale.
– Delineation of ecological subregions of the conterminous
United States. Keys, Cleland and McNab
– Testing ecoregion mapping hypotheses in Kentucky and
Tennessee, USA. McNab and Lloyd
– Effects of prescribed fire and ecological land types on the
structure and dynamics of oak-hickory forest ecosystems, USA. Fan, Dey, Niu, and Hartman
I met one of the people who developed the now 30-year old ECS for British Columbia, Andy Mackinnon. He was quite intrigued by our course, and pleased that I was allowed /supported to come to Vancouver to talk about it.
I also just learned that FIA data in Wisconsin is collected
with habitat type designation. Maybe we can work on Minnesota FIA data being collected with native plant community information!
It’s very interesting and informative to learn what other states and regions are doing with ecological classification, and how approaches and tools differ from place to place.
Cheers, Louise
July 19, 2007 at 5:40 pm
“This approach can improve productivity and also increase public acceptance of forest management.” This response demonstrates that ecological classification is being twisted into a public relations strategy for same-old industrial forest farming.
July 25, 2007 at 4:42 am
Today, 25 July, the first official spin-off training from the “Certificate Course in Ecosystem Silviculture” takes place in Grand Rapids.
The course is called “Glacial Landform Interpretation” and is led by Art Norton, The Nature Conservancy, field representative for the Forest Legacy Program.
What we see in northern Minnesota was shaped by glacial activity many thousands of years ago. Having the skill set to interpret landform features enables forest resource managers to link what they see above ground to soil characteristics (such as drainage, texture, and nutrient capacity) hidden below the gound’s surface. In turn this knowledge allows us to better understand why we see certain plants and trees where we do, thereby helping us make more ecologically appropriate forest management decisions.
To find out more about the course, please visit the Sustainable Forests Education Cooperative website.
http://sfec.cfans.umn.edu/featured.html#july
July 28, 2007 at 8:03 am
What a day – A room (and later, a bus) filled with interested natural resource professionals, mostly foresters, from across northern and central Minnesota intent on improving their skills in identifying the patchwork of landforms that make up this region.
The one-day course focused on glacially-derived Landform Types, and Landform Type Associations, as defined and mapped in the Mn DNR’s Ecological Classification System. County, state, federal and tribal resource professionals attended, providing a good cross-section of natural resource management experiences.
The workshop, “Glacial Landform Interpretation”, was developed in response to a need for more information about landforms that was expressed by participants in the certificate course in Ecosystem Silviculture that was developed by Louise Levy at the Minnesota Sustainable Forests Education Cooperative. That course directly supported one of Blandin’s VFVC objectives: to establish ecologically-based forest management as the norm in Minnesota.
I applaud the class’s interest and probing questions as they worked to learn the fine points of landform identification, and the important links between landforms, soils and the different forest types that have developed on them.
The 95 degree heat did not bother them in the least as we went into the field in the afternoon to drive over, walk on, and dig into eskers,ice-contact moraines, tunnel valleys and post-glacial sand dunes, to name a few.
And a special thanks to Louise Levy, who helped guide this workshop from concept to reality, and especially for her ability to make the links between landforms and ECS-based forestry. We hope to be able to offer this class again in the future, with the goal of improving ECS field skills for foresters and other natural resource practitioners.