![]() Broadleaf trees tended to have leaves turning brown or curling up, maybe half the leaf is dying. Still: Well, it varied a bit depending on the tree. Miller: If you had gotten closer to those areas that have been most affected, not a satellite, not a plane, but you were standing among these trees, what would you have seen? Other presentations talked about how you can see this from satellites as well, which is almost even more remarkable. And again that’s a lowball estimate for sure. So it’s sort of a dubious milestone I guess, but it’s a very large area. I mean, this is a new thing, more or less, to be seeing on earth. So that’s a minimum number.Īnd by some estimates it’s probably the largest scorch event in history. And the number that the researchers gave is at least 229,000 acres were scorched and they emphasize that’s an underestimate, because they just weren’t able to logistically fly many other areas that we think had scorched. ![]() And they could see really dramatic effects from the plane, mostly on west facing hillsides, that tended to be where things were worse, because the scorch tended to happen, we think, mostly in the afternoon when this direct sun was hitting vegetation when it was hottest. This heat scorch I think was a new thing for them. They do this routinely to look at things like insect outbreak impacts. And then when they think they see tree damage from the air, they then record what they think is causing that. What they do is they have people go up in planes flying low and slow basically, and they have trained spotters in the planes essentially looking at the windows with binoculars and tablets, and they’re able to record what they’re seeing. This was done by the United States Forest Service, in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Forestry, and also I think the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Still: Yeah, this is one of the most impressive presentations. ![]() How much could you actually see from the air? Miller : One of the presentations on Friday, if I understand correctly, was of aerial images of areas that have been affected by the heat dome. I mean most of the observations were in line with what others were saying, about which leaves were dying, and what parts of the tree, but some of the photos are really, really striking that people uploaded. We had close to 100 reports from around Oregon, and a few in Washington as well. So we were able to map where the observations came from. This website allows people to upload their location, their observations about what they saw, and what it compared to normally in their experience, and also they can upload photos. One of the things we learned is just the spatial extent. Oregonians love their trees and their forests, and I think this really was a testament to that. What exactly did everyday Oregonians contribute, and how did it help you understand what happened? Miller : One of the topics last week was a summary, as I understand it, of the citizen science inputs that went into the Oregon Department of Forestry. The symposium was an attempt to basically bring together various researchers and fields of science, to look at what happened, and to better understand the impact of what may happen going forward. We wanted to actually have a record that we could then go back to and explore later. And so I tried to spearhead an effort to get people to report what they were seeing to a website that’s hosted by the Oregon Department of Forestry, to get people to upload photos and report, so that we actually had a record of this, so it didn’t become what we call “anecdata,” where it sort of just anecdotal evidence. This kind of started just a week or so after the heat dome ended, and we started to get reports from people all over western Oregon about reports of leaf scorch and needle fall, and wondering about the connection to the heat wave. ![]() Still: Well, I wanted everyone to come together to basically share the information we all learned in the last few months. Miller : Why exactly did you want to put this symposium together? He joins us now to talk about what scientists have learned so far as well as the questions that still remain. He is a professor of forest ecology at OSU. Last week, Oregon State University hosted a symposium of tree researchers focused specifically on this issue. Researchers have been trying to determine what the stress of the heat dome did to trees in the short term, and what it might mean for the long term health of forests. After the extreme heat events of last summer, many trees across the Pacific Northwest turned brown at the edges. The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.ĭave Miller : This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller.
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