We are pleased to announce our 2022 webinar series. Each session includes an approximately 45-minute presentation and live questions and answers. Currently there is one way to participate: Watch live from your computer for a small fee. Eventually we will return to offering viewings at our local broadcast sites at no charge.
Click here to register!
We will record each webinar and post it on the SFEC YouTube Channel. Recordings are typically available within one week of the live broadcast.
*** Please note that the webinars for February, March, and the fire webinar in April will occur from 3:30-4:30 pm; these are part of the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources seminar series and are free to view. Additionally, while we are no longer offering registration for individual webinars, you can now purchase the entire series for a lower price ($20 for SFEC Members and Students, and $35 for Non-Members). After you have registered you will have access to join all of our webinars for the remainder of 2022! ***
Superior National Forest in Ely: Lessons Learned 10 years after the Pagami Creek Fire
Date: 28 February, 2022 from 3:30-4:30pm
Speaker: Aaron Kania, US Forest Service
On February 28, to kick off the Spring 2022 Forest Resources Seminar Series, we'll hear from Aaron Kania, Kawishiwi District Ranger with the Superior National Forest based in Ely. Aaron has over 25 years of experience, mostly in the intermountain west, caring for public lands with the US Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management. Since moving to the Superior National Forest in 2020, Aaron has immersed himself in issues related to wild and managed fire on the Superior, including a leadership role in management of fires during the summer of 2021. His role in the Greenwood Lake Fire response was grounded heavily in lessons learned from the 2011 Pagami Creek Fire, which burned 90,000 acres including an incredible 16-mile run in a single day. Aaron has made community engagement and input a priority, ensuring that diverse voices are heard and that as a community we learn from our past and move forward in a proactive way as we plan the future of our communities and natural resources. Aaron has quickly become known as a thoughtful and well-informed voice around issues that can be divisive and controversial, including fire. In an hour-long live conversation, Eli Sagor and Aaron will discuss how he has built a network and established himself in Minnesota after his 2020 move, and how he is working to advance knowledge and action around wildland fire ten years after the Pagami Creek Fire.
Nonbinary in NR: An Interview
Date: 28 March, 2022 from 3:30-4:30pm
Speaker: E. Krause, Michigan Tech University
Krause and Kyle are both queer-identified foresters in the Natural Resources (NR) community. As with everybody, their journeys as people and foresters are unique to them. Krause’s professional journey has taken them through wildland firefighting, criminal justice, and a Masters of Forestry at Michigan Tech. Along the way, they’ve been very open and forward through their writing and presentations at regional and national conferences about also being a member of the queer community. Since 2004, Kyle’s professional journey has primarily been based within the UMN, CFANS, and the FR department. For reasons that he is still learning about, he has been much less willing to be up front in professional settings about his identity as gay man.
During this conversation, Krause and Kyle will discuss their professional and personal lives as queer-identified people in NR. They’ll follow the Five Questions with a Forester interview format Kyle developed for the Camp 8 podcast and are also likely to be Caught in the Krausefire (Krause’s podcast). Their goals in sharing their stories through this conversation are to highlight that queer people are and have been working the NR community - a historically exclusive field for those who do not identify as a cisgender, straight, white, male - and to demonstrate allyship to people with similar or other discriminated identities.
Interpreting the stories from the rings of trees: Cultural fire use and the shaping of Great Lakes pine forests
Date: 25 April, 2022 from 3:30-4:30pm
Speaker: Kurt Kipfmueller
Tree-rings have long been an instrumental proxy for understanding fire on the landscape. In the Boundary Waters, M.L. Heinselman used tree-rings to eloquently and convincingly demonstrate the dependency of pine forests on fire for maintenance and regeneration, while also showing that a century of fire exclusion was having detrimental impacts. Fire suppression, he and others argued, would eventually lead to dramatic changes in the structure and composition of the pine landscapes of the Great Lakes. Tree rings provided an important temporal perspective on the history of fire during the centuries before Colonization and the lack of fire thereafter. However, it’s possible they didn’t reveal the entire story of fire. By illustrating several case studies, I’ll draw on more than a decade of fire history work in Minnesota to illustrate the important role played by Indigenous Peoples in tending the landscape using fire for cultural and resource management purposes. Throughout the talk I’ll touch on shifts in my own way of thinking about fire over time, and the agents that have driven Minnesota’s fire regimes over the last several centuries.
Forest Health Updates from Across Minnesota
Date: Recorded Tuesday April 19, 2022 from 9:00-10:00 am
Speaker: Rachael Dube, MN DNR Forest Health Specialist
Each year, the Minnesota DNR Forest Health team conducts both aerial assessments and on-the-ground monitoring to assess the health of the state’s forests. Join us for this webinar as MN DNR Forest Health Specialists provide an update on the status and trends in forest health from all corners of the state.
The Forest for the Bees
Date: Tuesday May 17, 2022 from 9:00-10:00 am
Speaker: Jessica Petersen, MN DNR Invertebrate Specialist
Bees are incredibly diverse and provide important ecological services such as pollination. However, baseline information such as faunistic surveys and habitat associations are lacking for most bee species in Minnesota. The Minnesota Biological Survey initiated a statewide native bee survey in 2015 that has increased the statewide list to well over 450 bee species and improved our understanding of the distribution and conservation status of many species. Forest-specific bees and their life histories with respect to forest management will be highlighted along with the overall results of the bee survey.
Links to content mentioned in the Q&A portion:
Upper Midwest Community Scientist Pollinator Monitoring Guide: Native Bees
Adaptive Silvicultural Experiments in Midwestern Hardwood Forests: Examples from Floodplains and Oak-dominated Uplands
Date: Thursday June 23, 2022 from 9:00-10:00 am
Speakers: Miranda Curzon, Iowa State Dept. of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, and Marcella Windmuller-Campione, UMN Dept. of Forest Resources
Join Drs. Miranda Curzon and Marcella Windmuller-Campione as they discuss their work on two Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project sites. The ASCC project represents a collaboration between managers and scientists to establish experimental trials that assess forest ecosystem response to climate adaptation approaches (resistance, resilience, transition, and passive no action). Miranda will introduce a new multi-state ASCC study to be implemented on state-owned lands in the Driftless Area. Next, Marcella will provide two-year results and insights from another ASCC site, a 736-acre urban floodplain forest in St. Paul, MN on the Mississippi River.
A Forest Optimization Tool for Modeling, Mapping, and Managing in Minnesota
Date: Tuesday July 19, 2022 from 9:00-10:00am
Speaker: John Du Plissis, Natural Resources Research Institute
A changing climate, changes in Minnesota’s forest products industry and increasing pressure for ecosystem service have and will continue to create challenges to managing Minnesota’s forests. University of Minnesota – Duluth’s Natural Resources Research Institute is developing a spatially-explicit decision tool that integrates forest productivity, ecosystem services, and economic information to help land managers assess the potential costs, benefits and tradeoffs between forest management options at a landscape scale over an 80 year planning period. This webinar will introduce the tool to participants, provide an overview of LANDIS-II and how the model works followed by discussion of how this tool can be best be used to guide resource management decisions at a landscape scale.
Links and information from the webinar:
ForCAST Tool: https://mnforcast.org/
IPCC Report on climate change scenarios: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/sres-en.pdf
Direct questions and requests to John Du Plissis at [email protected]
Work on Golden-winged Warblers and Other Early Successional Birds
Date: Tuesday August 23, 2022 from 9:00-10:00am
Speaker: Alexis Grinde, NRRI Research Program Manager
Minnesota’s forests provide critical breeding habitat for hundreds of resident and migrating bird species. Forest management provides an important opportunity to conserve and cultivate critical habitat for species of conservation concern including Golden-winged Warbler, Veery, and American Woodcock. These species have had significant population declines throughout their breeding ranges and all have a large portion of their breeding populations in Minnesota’s young forests. We have been conducting research to determine characteristics of young forests and identify forest management actions that maximize breeding season productivity for these bird species; results of our on-going study along with breeding cycle habitat management recommendations will be discussed.
Forest bird resources document compiled by Alexis Grinde: Forestry for Minnesota Birds
Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change: Lessons for timber-oriented managers
Date: Tuesday September 20, 2022 from 9:00-10:00 am
Speaker: Brian Palik, US Forest Service
The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project is designed to demonstrate adaptation options to natural resource managers and help them integrate climate change considerations into silvicultural decision making. Climate adaptation approaches being examined are designed to sustain ecosystem services into the future, including timber production. As one of the original developers of the ASCC adaptation framework, Brian Palik will discuss research results of interest to stakeholders having timber (or revenue) production as primary objectives. For example, what are the timber production tradeoffs, if any, associated with treatments designed to increase resilience? What growth responses have been observed since treatments were implemented? How are novel timber species, i.e., those adapted to climate change, responding to the treatments? How can these results inform management in similar forest ecosystems across the northern Lake States?
Communicating Silviculture
Date: Tuesday 18 October, 2022 from 9:00 - 10:00 am
Speakers: Mike Reinikainen, MN DNR; Brad Hutnick, WI DNR; Ryan Murphy, UMN Urban Forestry Lab
Managing ecosystems through silviculture is complicated. Communicating silvicultural concepts within organizations and a professional community at a time of rapid change in how we access and exchange information can be complicated too. Should we all jump on TikTok or start a podcast? Are webinars taking over the world or is there still a role for more traditional communications like research reports or decision support tools? As a practitioner, how would you like to access silvicultural information? Tune in for a panel discussion on communicating and educating about trees and silviculture with Mike Reinikainen from MN DNR, Brad Hutnick from WI DNR, and Ryan Murphy from the UMN Urban Forestry Lab. You’ll hear about innovative approaches and have a chance to share your ideas for better natural resources communications as well.
Slido questions and answers: while we couldn't get to all the questions live, a great discussion happened in the replies as well.
The Good, The Bad, and The Furry: A Modern Tale of Wetland Restoration, Invasive Cattails, and Muskrats
Date: Tuesday November 15, 2022 from 9:00-10:00 am
Speaker: Steve Windels, Voyageurs National Park
Non-native, invasive cattails (Typha spp.) have been invading Minnesota’s wetlands for more than a century. The result has been phalanxes of dense, monotypic stands of cattails marching out from the margins of wetlands across the state, ultimately choking out native vegetation and reducing biological diversity. The thick-lined border of a US National Park, including Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota, offers no special protection against such a vegetative horde, and in this presentation I will detail the NPS’ trials and tribulations, successes and failures since we initiated a restoration project in 2016 to reduce cattail abundance and restore wetlands in the park’s lakes to more diverse, natural states. I will also tell the story-within-a-story about native muskrats and their role in cattail invasions and our restoration efforts. The tale remains unfinished, though, and I will offer some insights about the coming chapters of this unfolding drama.
Minnesota Million: An Ambitious Vision for Reforesting One Million Acres of Minnesota
Date: Tuesday December 20, 2022 from 9:00-10:00am
Speaker: Mary Hammes, The Nature Conservancy
Overview: Reforesting one million acres across the state has the potential to enhance the resilience of communities, watersheds and working lands—providing benefits including carbon sequestration, flood reduction, economic opportunity, and wildlife habitat. A growing coalition of partners is focused on priority opportunity areas where reforestation is ecologically appropriate, logistically feasible, and beneficial to communities that have been most impacted by historical forest loss.