4033 SW Canyon Road 

Portland, Oregon 97221 USA 

Phone: 503‐488‐2130 

Fax: 503‐228‐4608 

http://wfi.worldforestry.org 

 

WFI Staff 

Sara Wu, WFI Director 

503‐488‐2130 

swu@worldforestry.org  

Chandalin Bennett,  

Program Manager 

503‐488‐2137  

cbennett@worldforestry.org  

 

WFI Fellows 

Sue Baker, Australia 

sbaker@worldforestry.org  

Ke Dong, China 

kdong@worldforestry.org  

Vijay Kolinjivadi, USA/

India 

vkolinjivadi@worldforestry.org  

I‐Chun Lu, Taiwan 

ilu@worldforestry.org  

Jagdish Poudel, Nepal 

jpoudel@worldforestry.org  

Vera Serrão, Portugal 

vserrao@worldforestry.org  

Daisuke Tajima, Japan 

dtajima@worldforestry.org 

Volume 9, Issue 3 • June 2010

Three New Fellows Welcomed to WFI

Send us your updates and photos for the next issue!

As summer starts to heat up in Portland, WFI welcomes three new Fellows to the program. Daisuke Tajima from Japan, I-Chun Lu from Taiwan, and Vera Serrão from Portugal join us for the best months of the year.

Daisuke Tajima started at WFI in early May and comes from Kyushu, an island off the southern coast of Japan. He is an undergraduate student at Keio University in Fujisawa studying forestry and natural resource management. Dai-suke’s family owns approxi-mately 1,300 hectares of for-estland in Japan, managed for timber and education. Public tours are given in his forest, and organizations like the YMCA and Girl Scouts help maintain the land. While at WFI, Daisuke will learn ways to use private forestland for recreational and educational purposes. He hopes to man-age his family’s forest some-day, and wants to have the

knowledge and skills to do so sustainably and profitably. Daisuke will be here only four months before he returns to school, but we welcome him and wish him the best of luck at WFI.

I-Chun Lu comes to us from Taipei, Taiwan. She is an assistant researcher in the Bo-tanical Garden division of the Taiwan Forest Research Insti-tute. She has degrees in for-estry and environmental edu-cation. I-Chun comes to WFI to study methods of natural resource education. Taiwan has many natural resources, but involving the public to learn about them is still new. I-Chun hopes to develop pro-grams and materials to change this. She is also interested in interpretation signage and techniques used in their crea-tion. I-Chun is also here for four months, but will gain much knowledge as she ex-plores the many different for-est education methods used here in Oregon.

Our most recent arrival, Vera Serrão, joins us from Lisbon, Portugal. Vera started at WFI in mid-June and will stay with us through the end of the year. Vera studied forest engineer-ing and natural resource man-agement in school.

Most recently, she worked as a forest engineer, preparing forest and civil protection management plans for a forest producers association. Portu-gal is a country with an in-creasing number of forest fires, and Vera comes to WFI to learn more about fire pre-vention and post-fire forest management. Specifically, she wants to know what man-agement strategies are used in different landscapes to prevent catastrophic fires, and which techniques are used to help a landscape recover from a fire. With the history of fire that we have in the West, we are sure that Vera will take away many useful tools from her studies here.

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Learning is Doing at Hopkins Demonstration Forest Fellows Daisuke Tajima and I-Chun Lu spent a day exploring the 140-acre Hop-kins Demonstration Forest in early June. Their host was Tim DeLano, a Community Outreach Educator of Ore-gon State University’s Ex-tension Faculty and steward of the Hopkins Forest, who works to close the “human-nature gap” by bringing peo-ple close to the forest. Dai-suke and I-Chun are learning to do the same in their re- sors—to write down their own

observations and experiences in the forest. I-Chun was most interested in interpretive signage and educational dis-plays used throughout the for-est, like the displays compar-ing even-aged to uneven-aged stands of trees. As DeLano had hoped, every-one left Hopkins having learned something new about trees and forest management in Oregon, but Daisuke and I-Chun also left with ideas of how to encourage others to close the “human-nature gap” worldwide.

Updates from WFI Alumni

Elikia poses with his family of five kids, wife, and brother, proudly wearing his ChocolateFest shirt.

spective countries, Japan and Taiwan. DeLano’s rules for guests to Hopkins are simple: be safe, be involved, learn something new, and leave no trace except for improvements to the land. Daisuke, whose family owns the company Tajima Forestry in Japan, particularly enjoyed the waterproof paper journals that DeLano typically hands out to visitors—from kinder-garteners to university profes-

Nerijus visits WFI three years after his fellowship program.

Lithuanian alumnus Nerijus Mi-skinis returns to Portland to try a permanent residence in the United States. Nerijus completed his fellowship program in 2007 and recently received his green card. He’s now living in Portland and hopes to begin work in the local forestry sector soon. I-Chun Lu stands next to the Pacific

madrone she has just identified in Hopkins Demonstration Forest.

Congolese alumnus Elikia Amani was happy to return home to his family earlier this year after his six month fellowship. Since his return, he has had an article pub-lished in the Society of American Foresters newsletter, The For-estry Source. Please see the June 2010 issue to read up on forestry issues in his home country De-mocratic Republic of the Congo.

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Two New Interns Volunteer at WFI for the Summer

From left to right: I-Chun Lu (Taiwan), Daisuke Tajima (Japan), and intern Rebecca Muessle listen to the Native American myth about the “mice” hiding in Douglas fir cones.

Rebecca Muessle Ashley Huff

WFI is pleased to welcome two new interns to the staff for the summer, Rebecca Muessle and Ashley Huff. Rebecca will be a senior at Boston College next fall, where she studies Studio Art and Hispanic Studies. Even without a background in forestry, except for a love of her native Ore-gon’s forests and wildlife, Rebecca is thrilled to learn more everyday about her international co-workers’ research in her home state. Ashley is working towards her Associates of Applied Science degree in Natural Resources Technology at Mt. Hood Community College. Ashley is excited to work with the Fellows and learn more about forestry and office administration during her eight weeks at WFI.

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Coastal Conservation Through Eyes of Non-profit “This place is magical,” com-mented Fellow Vijay as the group emerged from forest cover into the view of the ocean. The amazing view of the Pac i f i c Ocean was only one of the high-lights of the day as Fellows learned more about the unique conserva-tion strategies of TNC.

Hiking was slow, as discus-sions ranged from conser-vation easements to water-shed-level conservation strategies. The magic of the landscape really comes from TNC’s cooperation with other landowners within the watershed to pre-serve the landscape in and around the headlands. The fact that a non-profit or-ganization can work with other local agencies, as well as larger federal institutions like the Forest Service, to achieve something positive for the landscape was a key message for the day and impressed the entire group.

Australian Fellow Sue Baker (center) watches as logs are dragged up by cables.

Recent Events Fellows toured the Cas-cade Head Nature Pre-serve, the coastal head-lands owned and managed by global non-profit The Nature Conservancy. Stewardship ecologist Debbie Pickering led Fel-lows on a trail through forested areas of multiple ownerships out to the headlands of the preserve. The headlands are native grasslands overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which TNC calls a “spectacular” feature on the landscape.

Fellow Aline Embarks on Another Adventure Aline Moreira spent one year with WFI on an Ameri-can Forest Foundation-sponsored fellowship. Aline completed her program in early June and was our first fellow working on environ-mental education with Pro-ject Learning Tree. Among other things, she developed teacher training modules for each chapter in the Global Connections: Forest of the World teaching curriculum. She hopes that PLT teachers

around the country will pick up her training program. These modules are currently available on the PLT website at: http://www.plt.org/cms/pages/21_21_17.html. Aline has since moved to England to pursue new opportunities, combining her unique skills in environmental education, resource management, and social science. She will be missed at WFI and we wish her the best of luck in her new adventures!

Brazilian Fellow Aline Moreira on Vancouver Island in February

From left: Daisuke Tajima, Ke Dong, Jagdish Poudel, Sue Baker, Vijay Kolinjivadi, and Chandalin Bennett brave the cool spring weather to tour the coastal property.

Fellows were invited to partici-pate in a cable-logging demonstra-tion lab held for one of Oregon State University’s forest engineer-ing courses. Sue Baker (Australia) and Daisuke Tajima (Japan) at-tended. Daisuke was particularly impressed by the harvesting method, as cable harvesting is very uncommon in Japan. Fellows were treated to a full-scale opera-tion, with all the bells and whis-tles—literally!

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The opening day of a new exhibit at the World Forestry Center’s Discovery Museum is always an exciting event. Fellows attended the opening of Pendleton: Weaving America’s Spirit, the latest and ex-hibit in the museum that runs through August 15th.

From left: Ke Dong (China), Sue Baker (Australia), and Daisuke Ta-jima (Japan) pose in front of the col-orful wool blankets displayed in the exhibit.

Fellows eat lunch on the native grasslands of the Preserve overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

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Fellows Attend Fifth Annual MC Ranch Trip Fellows spent an unforgetta-ble week in mid-June at Harry Merlo’s ranch in eastern Ore-gon. This was the fifth an-nual trip to MC Ranch, and the group experienced every-thing from equipment demon-strations for logging and bio-mass to a backcountry hike to learn about multi-use land management. The group that traveled to the ranch this year was large: six international Fellows, plus Program Man-ager Chandalin Bennett and Senior Fellow Rick Zenn. The large group allowed com-plexity in conversations re-garding land management and use, as each Fellow comes to the U.S. with a different back-ground and perspective in natural resources. Ranch manager Rex Christen-sen toured Fellows around the ranch, explaining the forest management goals of the property and how he balances and prioritizes forest health, sustainability, and livelihood

in diverse projects. A hike from the south end of the property along a ridgeline to the north end highlighted many of the innovative man-agement regimes he has im-plemented, such as in-woods logging, growth of poor health trees for biomass, and

extensive tree planting throughout the land. In addition to the guided tour around the ranch, there was a full-day d e m o n s t r a t i o n focused on forest sustainability, us-ing MC Ranch as the prime example of how to reach what Rick Wagner of ODF called the “sweet spot” of sustainability. That spot sits in the center of the spec-trum from extreme environmentalism to extreme profit-based timber harvest—the perfect balance of social, economic, and ecological needs. A showcase of value-added, non-traditional forest projects were displayed at Harry’s ranch, along with equipment

demonstrations that included a mulcher, frontloader, wood chipper, and a portable saw mill. Local government, state forestry, university extension, and local landowners were pre-sent to participate in the demon-strations. The tour was partici-patory, with the Fellows learn-

Recent Events

ing how to feed the chipper and even how to use a chainsaw! “I thought the day was incredibly informative and showed me ma-chines and methods I have never seen before,” said Nepalese Fel-low Jagdish Poudel. This trip also included an off-site visit to the Oberteuffer Forest, a nearby piece of forest donated to Oregon State University. Fellows were treated to a presentation from OSU extension forester Paul Oester about the history of exten-sion service in the U.S.; specifi-cally, what extension provides to the rural community. Paul then toured everyone around various harvesting and thinning trial sites, as well as understory treatment experiments. It was a great op-portunity to see a clear example of uneven-aged management. “That’s a good demonstration,” commented Australian Fellow Sue about the understory treat-ment trials there. The Fellows were also treated to an exceptional experience at Harry’s ranch house. Dodi Tombleson and Cathy Christen-sen provided the WFI group with amazing dinners and excellent company in the evenings around the dinner table as well as the campfire. It was a unique experi-ence for the Fellows and one that will not be forgotten.

Senior Fellow Rick Zenn discusses old growth forests on a rainy hike through the forests of Mt. St. Helens in May. Siouxon Creek was the site visited, and even though the area’s trees are not old growth, the forest thrives 30 years after the volcano’s eruption.

Ranch Manager Rex Christensen and his wife join WFI Fellows and Program Manager Chandalin Bennett in front of an elk statue. (Everyone had the chance to see real elk, too!)

Nepalese Fellow Jagdish Poudel listens to Rick Dunning, executive director of the Washington County Small Woodland Owners Association, discuss forest man-agement and conservation at the WCSWA annual potluck..

Fellows Vijay Kolinjivadi (India/USA) and Jagdish Poudel (Nepal) visit a site man-aged for ecosystem services as part of OSU’s Starker Lecture Series capstone fieldtrip in May.

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ODF and MC Ranch staff and other Fellows look on as I-Chun Lu (Taiwan) learns to operate a chainsaw. Fellows learned to use a variety of forestry equipment during their stay.