A first-round winner

William S. Alverson

Managing forests

Biodiversity doesn't exist just in tropical forests. It is everywhere: in the depths and shallows of the oceans and bays, in kitchen-window herb gardens, in the very air and soil. And it is surprisingly rich in the temperate forests that make up half the total of Earth's tree cover .

William S. Alverson has known that richness since his childhood in central Wisconsin, where he spent much of his time out-of-doors. But it wasn't until his college years brought a trip to Latin America Natahala forest, evening

that the student became entranced with the diversity of species around him. He fell in with a group of biologists on a plant-collecting expedition. As he reported later, “I’d see not only species of butterfly that I’d never seen before, but I’d also see kinds of organisms that I had no categories for.”

Alverson’s interest in the diversity of the tropics has never waned, but there is a special place in his heart for the richness of the cooler forests of the United States’ Upper Midwest. His Biodiversity Leadership Award recognizes his efforts to insure that such forests be better managed than in the past, when biodiversity has been sacrificed in the name of “multiple use” of resources.

Alverson’s work has led him to challenge the management efforts of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in two of its forests: the Chequamegon (“SHWA-me-gun”) and the Nicolet. The forests’ 741,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) are the home of mixed hardwoods, softwoods, microorganisms, insects, vertebrates, and even orchids.

Treating forests as commodities. It was Alverson’s contention, and that of the Wisconsin Forest Conservation Task Force, a coalition of colleagues from academia, environmentalism, and law, that the USFS was treating the forests as commodities — as sources of lumber and game — and nature as merely a resource to be molded and twisted into something “useful.” For decades, the Forest Service has marched under the banner of “multiple use, sustained yield.” Alverson feels that “multiple use,” as practiced by the government, imperils biodiversity.

Too frequently, he says, managers of temperate forests have jammed numerous applications (timber cutting, wild game hunting, fishing, wildlife habitat, watershed protection) into plots of land too small to accommodate all of them. The evolutionary dynamics of groups of plants and animals are adversely affected, and disturbance brought on by multiple use’s timbering component can severely affect the diversity of flora and fauna far beyond the boundaries of a single management plot.

Alverson and the Wisconsin Forest Conservation Task Force tried to influence the Forest Service’s planning efforts through the Service’s own built-in system of public hearings and comments and draft management plans. Eventually, however, they went into federal court in an effort to force USFS to base its land-management decisions on more scientific grounds.

They lost the overall courtroom war, but believe they won an important battle. Alverson feels that pressures such as those from the task force have caused the Forest Service to pay more attention to scientific issues of the forests and less to political and economic expediency. Doing this will require a serious revision of what Alverson terms the “agency culture” of forest managers, but he thinks a start has been made.

The tiniest forest creatures. Bil Alverson is using part of his Biodiversity Leadership Award to make it likely that forest managers cannot fail to notice the enormous range of biological forest, near Slave River, Northwest Territories diversity under their control. He is establishing a Diversity Inventory Group, a non-profit corporation that will catalogue biodiversity at multiple levels, not just the trees and game animals, but also the less obvious species such as lichens and arthropods. Once USFS and other managers understand what lives in the forests and the far-ranging ecological connections forest life enjoys, “multiple use” will take on a more valid meaning

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