Charter

History

Employees

Aquatic & Land Interaction Team website

Mission Statement

The Forest Service has one of the most extensive and productive program of integrated forestry research in the world. Forest Service Research develops and provides scientific and technical knowledge for all 1.6 billion acres of forests and rangelands in the United States, including but not limited to the National Forests.

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station is one of nine centers of research in the Forest Service. The PNW Station's mission is to serve society by improving the understanding, use, and management of natural resources. The Station directly contributes to solutions of increasingly urgent natural resource issues and to the ongoing process of answering significant basic questions in natural science.

The PNW Station has 10 locations: a headquarters in Portland, Oregon, and 9 laboratories in Alaska (Anchorage, Juneau, and Sitka), Oregon (Corvallis, La Grande, and Portland), and Washington (Olympia, Seattle, and Wenatchee). The Station has about 500 permanent and temporary employees working in aquatic biology, botany, computer science, fire science, wildlife biology, social science, statistics, and many other professions. The Station is organized to maximize integration and synergy among specialists.

The Station has three research and development components: 1) biophysical, social, and economic processes; 2) management issues; and 3) inventory, monitoring, and policy application. The Research Station is organized into seven program areas to address these issues.

Scientists at the Wenatchee Lab work under the Managing Disturbance Regimes program to address management issues. The team studies the interrelation among disturbance regimes, forest development, and resource sustainability and how land management affects these disturbances and can be used to improve forest health, sustainability, and productivity.

Scientists work day-to-day with the issues of biodiversity, economics, forest health, global climate change, and sustainability of resources. The research in each of these areas is diverse yet interconnected. A majority of the Station's research is conducted in the Pacific Northwest, but scientists often have expertise sought nationally and internationally.