U.S. Forest Service research is highly regarded, but is threatened by attrition. Having fewer researchers in the field flies in the face of the recent call for “the best available science.”

In 1828, federal forestry research debuted on the White House lawn. With an eye toward increased timber production, President John Quincy Adams began a series of germination studies with acorns and tubs of water. Eventually, he went back to the business of being president and never completed his acorn research.

The United States’ first encounter with forestry research taught a valuable lesson that resonates today: forestry science may hold the promise of practical future benefits, but it shouldn’t be left in the hands of politicians.

In the last 175 years, federal forest research has outgrown Adams’s acorns. The U.S. Forest Service runs the largest forestry research program in the world: eight regional research stations and scientists working in every state. These scientists have provided evidence of disappearing species, such as the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, and environmental problems from DDT. The research branch runs the largest termite research project in the world and investigates technology to recycle paper products. In addition, these scientists track acid rain and provide citizens with novel timber products like fire-resistant plywood.

Despite the innovation of Forest Service research, the agency is searching for a constituency. Former Chief Jack Ward Thomas says that neither environmentalists nor industry has a real love for research. “Research becomes the whipping boy for both sides of the extremes,” he says. “Nobody cares about truth because they’ve already got their minds made up.”

As the Forest Service has been trumpeting the need for “the best available science,” it has been cutting the number of scientists who provide the answers to complex forestry conundrums. If the current situation continues, institutional intellectual curiosity will be replaced by the whim of political mandate.

It wasn’t always this way. When Theodore Roosevelt created the Forest Service in 1908, the research branch was walled off from the organization to protect researchers from political pressure. This differs dramatically from other government agencies, such as the National Park Service, whose researchers report directly to the park supervisor. This independence allows researchers to perform studies they think are scientifically important, even when doing so runs counter to Forest Service policy.

Thomas says when he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in the 1960s, the Forest Service was planning DDT applications but research showed the spraying was not needed. Thomas’s study group was about to publish some journal papers, and the data on insect numbers showed that the insect population was in collapse. Not only was the spraying unwarranted, says Thomas, but their research was starting to show it might be ecologically harmful.

“The only thing the Forest Service asked us to do was delay publication for six weeks,” says Thomas. “And that just caused a war. We said no way, and the publications came out on time.”

What makes the research branch an unrivaled scientific organization is the way it differs from academia. “I’ll put it into three terms that are interlinked,” says Tom Quigley, director of the Pacific Northwest Research Station. “One is long-term, and the other is interdisciplinary. The final term is broad scale, where we look at landscapes on a much larger scale than anyone else, thanks to our ties to national and experimental forests.”

The word long-term comes up during interviews with Forest Service researchers for good reason. In academia, most experiments conclude within two years, the time it takes to churn out a master’s degree student. In other cases, the study may last four or five years, the time period of the grant supporting the research.

But in the Forest Service, four years is considered an infancy period for a project, the time a scientist uses to gain knowledge and establish expertise. Without the constraints of graduate students or grants, Forest Service studies can stretch into decades, outliving the researcher who started them.

Andy Dollof, a project leader for the Coldwater Streams and Trout Habitat unit of the Southern Research Station, says complex ecological processes can never be understood by short-term research projects. “We’re looking for continuity, so places like Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory have projects that began in the 1920s and go on indefinitely,” he says. “Continuous stream flow, weather monitoring, precipitation, water chemistry. That’s the core that turns on the light in Forest Service research.”

Scientists are eager to participate in these projects, some leaving academia to join the Forest Service. The international community also recognizes the importance of Forest Service research. Last year’s recipient of the Marcus Wallenberg Prize, an esteemed international award in forestry, was awarded to Forest Service researcher Melvin T. Tyree.

“In the last fifteen years, there have been four Americans to win that award,” says Robert Lewis, the Deputy Chief of Research and Development for the Forest Service, “and all of them came from the Forest Service. [Tyee] left a tenured position at the University of Vermont to come work for us.”

“What is unique about the Forest Service is the depth of [its] research capacity, which is the largest in the world and equal to the capacity of all the forestry schools in America combined,” says Frank Cubbage, who heads North Carolina State University’s Department of Forestry.

Top Forest Service officials in the Washington office appear to highly prize agency scientists. In press releases and during congressional testimony, they highlight the importance of science in forestry management.

Researchers in the Forest Service sing a different tune, however. They say that like any other organization, the Forest Service sets priorities with its budget. “If you want to see what someone finds important, look at how they spend their money,” says one researcher. By this measure, Forest Service science is low on the priority list, garnering less than 10 percent of the budget.

The budget for research increases every year, but it does not take into account the fiscal realities of contemporary science. For one thing, it costs three times as much to field a research scientist today as it did ten years ago. Budget increases must also keep pace with pay increases and the cost of promoting scientists. It’s like Alice in Wonderland discovering that she must run just to stay in the same place.

In response, the money for research has barely kept pace with inflation. “When people retire, we cannot afford to hire a replacement,” says Michael Rains, director of the Northeastern Research Station. Instead, he says, the saved money is plowed back into the general revenue.

Part of the fiscal problem stems from institutional practices within the Forest Service. When a budget comes out, the Washington office takes its piece, the station directors take their cuts and the leftover goes to research.

Even with a flat budget, the Forest Service sometimes raids the research branch for expertise and money. In 1996, the research branch was hit with a 10 percent budget giveback from which it never recovered. Thomas has another take on the process. “Office of Management and Budget tells you what your budget is going to be,” he says. “They’re trying to keep costs in check. Now, everyone has their pet projects, but the constituencies for Forest Service research are pretty small compared to the constituencies for a new bomber or medical discoveries.”

As it is being bled out by the OMB, research is losing personnel and expertise and research laboratories are quietly closing across the nation. Like a routed army, personnel with different jobs are being lumped together to maintain some sense of order. At times, a plant pathologist ends up in the same lab as a wildlife biologist. It’s not because this increases efficiency, but because that’s how the retreat is being handled.

Research should have “a good balanced portfolio of management, protection and utilization,” says Rains. Eventually, he says, research will become unbalanced, focused on commodity production or invasive species. “Even questions in entomology will be shifted to ask commodity questions,” he says. “Instead of How does this insect affect the natural ecosystem? the question will become Why are these beetles eating up the timber?”

But it doesn’t take a doctorate in entomology to solve the problem. The answer is obvious: increase the budget. The problem with this answer is that it won’t work.

“When the Forest Service submits a budget, you submit three options—same budget, up 5 percent and down 5 percent,” says Thomas. Noting that research has lost 45 percent of its scientists, he adds, “Now if you ask for a 50 percent increase, then you’re not even on the playing field.”

Thomas is retired and can say what he wants. But it’s difficult to get a Forest Service official in Washington to breathe a word about increasing budgets. When interviewed, Lewis did his best to dodge this issue. And when the questions boxed him in, a spokesperson broke up the interview and said, “We are all civil servants, and we have a budget, and we operate under it.”

It’s the best answer the Forest Service will give. The research branch may be collapsing under the current Forest Service chief, but the problem was around long before he was in charge and will continue long after he is gone.

One researcher, who refused to go on record, cited this scenario. “As we lose more money, we are now competing in the broader academic community for grants in areas where we didn’t in the past,” he says. “So we are slowly beginning to lose our uniqueness. Now it’s not going to be when I’m around, but in maybe twenty years from now, when everyone in charge is gone, someone in Congress will ask, “Why do we need this research? It’s no different from everything else.”

He pauses for a moment before continuing, “And then this will all be gone.”