Ecosystem Monitoring
Web Site Link Reports
This Biophysical Monitoring Project was developed, proposed
and implemented by both the community of Lake County and the
Forest Service to observe and record the condition of and
the effect of restoration actions on the Upper Chewaucan
Watershed. The watershed contains 268 square miles of both
public and private lands, the bulk of which is part of the
Lakeview Federal Sustained Yield Unit within the
Fremont-Winema National Forest. The Upper Chewaucan
watershed was chosen for the monitoring project because of
its condition and the effort by the Forest Service and the
community to restore it to health and social and economical
viability.
The project goals are to collect relational indicator
information from the landscape, from tree top to below
ground on the same site; use equipment and methodologies
that are relevant, sensitive, relatively inexpensive,
standardized, repeatable, and usable; and to create a
relational database that allows anyone to query inventory
information from the watershed, in order to gauge rates of
watershed repair over time. We focused on the behavior of
the forces at work within the watershed by way of collecting
data. This endeavor required us to learn and hone new skills
to observe landscape attributes, select the indicators
contained in them, accurately measure and faithfully record
the results.
In the begining a team of eight young men and
women was chosen from the community for their learning skills,
field experience, and their ability and willingness to work
together. All of them gravitated toward aspects of the landscape
that interested them, be it soils, trees, plants, aquatic
insects or photo-documentation and hand-mapping. The field work
entailed much travel and long hours, four days per week. Their
enthusiasm for learning how ecosystems function, to identify
plants and macro-invertebrates, soil conditions, species
interactions, and the like increased as the summer progressed.
The result was beyond our expectations. The whole team is
returning to take up where they left off. Some have changed
their career and learning paths toward the natural sciences.
The initial work consisted of establishing base areas that
contain clusters of 10x40-meter transects. We established
145 transects upon which we performed approximately 600
surveys. We inventoried the many indicators, at times more
than thirty. We took close to 1700 digital images, many of
which are composite 360 panoramic views. Many hand maps were
drawn of the base areas, especially those that included
stream courses. Hand maps detail information that cannot be
arrived at through aerial or ground photo-documentation.
An example of the work that has gone on, team members Alex
Plato and Luke Dary have archived the collected data and
imagery in Microsoft Excel and Access. Luke carefully built
the table structure from the indicator fields (keys), so
that anyone viewing the data can easily access and query the
contents and extract answers to their own questions about
the Upper Chewaucan and our work
We are pleased that we were able to gather a large amount of
data, given the time needed for training and the short
growing season. Our work led us to discover the
relationships within the many landscapes we entered and
measured. We also discovered our individual relationship to
the landscape at hand, as well as our collective
relationship while working together. The community has an
investment in the training and experience of the crew, so it
is much to the advantage of the community and the project
that they want to continue.
