Following the mapmaker.

A maverick geographer with a holistic vision is helping the Forest Service and its fellow agencies figure out ecosystems.

BIG CHANGES are afoot at the U.S. Forest Service. One reason is that the agency is listening to a mild-mannered mapmaker named Bob Bailey. So are a number of other federal agencies. In fact, Bailey's maps and the scientific hierarchy he developed may turn out to be the compass that points the way toward a common ground for the Forest Service and National Park Service. If that sounds like pie-in-the-sky, read on.

For the past 20 years, Dr. Robert G. Bailey has been studying and mapping ecosystems, classifying them into a complex hierarchy. Now the Forest Service has adopted the Bailey hierarchy, with some modifications, as the cornerstone of "ecosystem management," the agency's latest and most promising move toward an ecological approach to managing our nation's forests.

Other agencies are starting to sign on to the Bailey system. At Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service adopted the Bailey hierarchy years ago as the scientific framework for its National Wetlands Inventory, and now the department's new National Biological Survey will use it as the basis for monitoring biodiversity. The National Science Foundation is already using the hierarchy for its long-term ecological research network (LTER). Other agencies are either working hand in hand (Bureau of Land Management), adopting a wait-and-see attitude but sticking around (Soil Conservation Service), or dropping by for earnest talks (National Park Service).

Ecosystem management is the hottest ticket in town because it suggests a route around train wrecks of the spotted-owl variety. Instead of managing for individual species, the new holistic approach aims to manage entire ecosystems. Trouble is, nobody is sure what ecosystem management is. For that matter, people are still trying to figure out what ecosystems are.

Enter Bob Bailey, chief geographer on the Forest Service's planning staff. In 1992, the agency began an intensive search for answers, and Bailey's work surfaced. One reason is that Bob Bailey is a man driven by a vision--a holistic, ecosystem kind of vision.

On the surface, what he has to say sounds rather simple--the kind of stuff we learned back in Ecology 101. First, he says, climate is the dominant force that shapes ecosystems. Climate--the seasonal and day-to-day fluctuations in solar energy, rainfall, and other moisture--determines the composition of vegetation and the kinds of animals present in an ecosystem. Climate even drives the formation of soil. Identical kinds of geological materials weather differently in different climates, breaking down into predictable soil types.

Complicating the analysis, however, is the fact that climate is modified locally by landform features such as mountains and valleys on the earth's surface. Relief and surface slope, by affecting the macroclimate, help determine local soils, vegetation, and animals. Climate is the major force shaping ecosystems, but landform is the secondary differential criterion.

Bailey's next main principle is that ecosystems differ in size. The smaller ones, when they share a similar structure, can be grouped together as part of a larger ecosystem. In geographical lingo, smaller-scale ecosystems are nested within systems of a higher order. Ecosystems thus occur in an orderly ranking or hierarchy.

At the broadest geographical scale, Bailey refers to ecosystems as ecoregions. At the ecoregion scale, the largest ecological unit is called a "domain." A continent such as North America has four domains shaped by broad climatic forces (see "The Forest Service's Hierarchy of Ecosystems"). From there, ecosystems occur in a descending hierarchy of subregions, landscapes, and land units (the sites or stands familiar to foresters and range scientists).

Locating the boundaries of smaller-scale ecosystems requires taking into account visible and tangible expressions of climate such as vegetation. Altogether, Bailey identifies eight levels of ecological units. All are ecosystems, but on different map scales. Moving down the map scale permits viewing the environment with greater and greater resolution.

Bailey's third principle is that ecosystems occur in orderly, predictable patterns. Marine climatic ecoregions, for example, are always located on the northwestern side of continents. Furthermore, information about sites within one marine ecoregion such as Oregon and Washington is applicable to analogous sites within another marine ecoregion such as northwestern Europe. Conclusions about sensitivity to acid rain, estimates of forest yields, or best management practices for protecting fisheries are transferable among similar sites within these marine ecoregions.

Because data can be safely extended to analogous sites within a region, the ecosystem maps can eliminate duplication of sampling, monitoring, and other research efforts. The maps provide a geographical framework for identifying similar areas where similar responses can be expected and similar management policies can be applied. Reducing the need for environmental inventories represents a savings of time and money for land-management agencies.

"This hierarchy facilitates a regional rather than a site-by-site approach to planning land use," Bailey explains. "We've always done things on a site-specific basis. Now we recognize that those sites fit into larger systems, and what goes on in the smaller pieces is controlled by what goes on in the larger units."

Bailey and the Forest Service maintain TABULAR DATA OMITTED that another benefit of adopting the hierarchy is the improved understanding that can be gained when land managers take a wider perspective and view smaller ecosystems, such as stands, in terms of the larger forces and systems that shape them. The linkages between ecosystems are as important as individual components such as soils or plants.

That's pretty much it in a vastly over-simplified nutshell. The way Bailey tells it, this is not the first time these views of his have been noticed by his bosses in the Forest Service.

"For a few years, I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread," says this soft-spoken geographer, "and then for a few years, they're saying, 'Who is this guy?'"

Right now, he's sliced bread.

The first time they noticed Bailey was in 1975. At that time, he had been working for the Forest Service for nine years. In 1966 he assisted with a field study on slope stability in chaparral watersheds near Los Angeles. In 1971, his research on slope stability in Teton National Forest earned him a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.

By then he had also worked as a hydrologist on a Forest Service planning team that developed a system to classify the capacity of Lake Tahoe Basin to accommodate development. The system was incorporated into law and over the years was challenged numerous times by developers--unsuccessfully.

Shortly thereafter, he was invited to join the Forest Service's Intermountain office and asked to classify the higher levels of an ecosystem hierarchy. That was the start of what he calls ecogeography. Building on work done by John Crowley, of the University of Montana, and a number of other researchers, Bailey fleshed out his own system and finally drew his first ecoregion map of North America.

In 1975 a visitor from Forest Service headquarters saw the map hanging on a wall of Bailey's office. The visitor engineered an invitation for Bailey to make a presentation to then-Chief John McGuire. The outcome was use of the map in the 1975 Resources Planning Act assessment.

After that, the Forest Service forgot about Bob Bailey. But prophets without honor in their own country proverbially receive recognition elsewhere. The Fish and Wildlife Service encouraged the Forest Service to publish Bailey's work as Ecoregions of the United States in connection with the National Wetlands Inventory.

Two years later, he was transferred to research and later the planning staff at Fort Collins, Colorado, where he remains today. His assignment at the time of the transfer was to develop a national ecological land classification for interagency application. Ironically, it has taken 16 years for that effort to come to fruition.

One reason it took so long is that the maverick geographer was ahead of his time in maintaining that disciplinary specialization is inherently incompatible with ecosystem management. His colleagues clung to studying ecosystems in terms of components: soil, water, vegetation, or wildlife. Bailey maintains that this mind-set sees the environment as composed of pieces, and the result is management for individual resources such as timber and wildlife rather than managing ecosystems as wholes.

"There is a unity and orderliness in nature," Bailey says. "There's a rhyme and reason out there that's discernible and amenable to analysis. A case in point is that all steep slopes have shallow soils. Recognition of this orderliness and unity is a basic tenet of ecogeography."

Given his holistic view of nature, Bailey sees a need for evolutionary change in educational institutions to reduce compartmentalization of academic disciplines. In the Forest Service, the corresponding problem is separation of functions.

"We have a staff set up for wildlife and fisheries, a staff for timber, a staff for recreation, each with its own budget," Bailey explains. "There has been no common unifying framework to bring the functions together."

Despite his long-standing belief that the Forest Service needs fundamental change, Bailey stayed within the system, quietly working out his ideas and publishing them in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He believed in what he was doing and kept at it for two decades in the face of detractors.

When he finished mapping the ecosystems of North America, he went on to produce an ecoregions map of the continents of the world. Currently, in between trips to Washington to explain his hierarchy, he's working on an ecoregions map of the oceans.

"The rationale is that if we are to understand the continents," he explains, "we must understand the oceans because they control to a large extent the continental systems."

The obvious question is: Once he finishes the world, what's next? An ecoregions map of the solar system? Can we understand this planet without understanding its linkages to the larger ecosystem? And then there's the universe . . .

Bailey shakes his head. No, he'll go back to the map of North America and refine it.

Oh, sure. Buy that and you probably believe the world is flat.

MAPPING OUT COMMON GROUND

Last November the Forest Service adapted the Bailey hierarchy of ecological units for use as the scientific framework for ecosystem management of the national forests. A glossary of ecological terminology was developed in order to standardize definitions. The next step will be national assessments to determine the condition of ecosystems and the forests within them. These assessments will be distinguished from RPA assessments by being based on ecoregions.

Gene Lessard, the agency's assistant director for ecosystem management, is coordinating a steering committee to design the assessments. The committee includes representatives from seven federal agencies. Also on board are five nongovernmental organizations: The Nature Conservancy, National Association of State Foresters, Renewable Natural Resources Foundation, American Institute of Biological Sciences, and The Wilderness Society.

The Forest Service is emphasizing partnerships because a given ecosystem may contain land that is under a number of jurisdictions. Partnerships are necessary if ecosystems are to be managed for sustainability.

"In the southern pine forests, for example," Lessard explains, "Forest Service lands by themselves would have a tough time producing sustainably viable populations of the red-cockaded woodpecker, without partnerships with other federal and state and private lands."

The steering committee will select three prototype assessments at the province level, perhaps using cover types as a coarse filter for determining whether ecological processes are functioning for sustainability. Possibilities include the Sierras, Columbia Basin, Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, or Everglades.

The 1994 budget earmarks $100,000 for the three prototype assessments. "With the latest budget crunch," Lessard says, "an additional $22.5 million for assessments that was in the 1995 budget was re-allocated."

Whether a portion of those funds can be recovered will depend in part on the Forest Service's new chief, Jack Ward Thomas.

"The absence of that $22.5 million will not deter us from proceeding on our course," says Thomas. "Many of us inside the Forest Service helped pioneer ecosystem management as a concept, and we are eager to bring it into reality."

What counts is how funds for wildlife or timber or recreation management are expended. Ecosystem management "works against the grain of detailed functional budgeting," Thomas explains. "When one takes an ecosystem approach, it is rather difficult to determine how much of an ecosystem expenditure benefited wildlife and how much benefited fish or grazing or timber."

Thomas understands concerns of groups such as The Wildlife Society that funds for functions like wildlife management will be lost by being subsumed under ecosystem management. He notes that the agency is working on internal auditing procedures to ensure tracking of accountability for funds.

Thomas sets to rest any doubts about his intentions: "I welcome the opportunity of moving from the position of being a scientist who has advocated such an approach for several decades to being chief of the Forest Service, where perhaps I can insist on seeing that theory is turned into practice."

Managing for ecological processes--turning theory into practice--will be much more complex than managing to produce a stand of trees. "People ask me if we can't make ecosystem management simpler," Lessard notes, "and the answer is absolutely not. Instead, we are going to have to get a lot smarter."

In particular, research on ecological processes is needed, as opposed to the single-site or large-scale research of the past. As the new knowledge accumulates, ecosystem management will need continual refinement and, when necessary, changes of direction to get it right.

Incorporating large water systems will be one of the major challenges since a river like the Mississippi passes through 20 ecological provinces. Migratory birds and other wildlife species that cross large ecoregions present another challenge, as do the human dimensions of ecosystems: economics, aesthetics, recreation values.

Lessard expects skepticism and considers it healthy. But to those skeptics who would rather manage watersheds than ecosystems, he maintains that "working in watersheds does not provide understanding of the total ecological context."

To skeptics within the environmental community, he says that they have been right to fight the Forest Service. But the time has come for a truce, and he calls on environmental groups to follow the example of The Nature Conservancy by chipping in to protect ecosystems.

Lessard predicts that we will see a number of changes to planning regulations over the next few years to incorporate ecological processes. We will also see much more interagency planning.

"When you get the National Park Service dropping in on the Forest Service, wanting to tie into our planning process," he notes, "then you know that you're starting to make the right moves. The Park Service people have even been starting to talk management of land. People are coming to a common middle."

ECOMANAGEMENT WORKSHOPS

The accompanying article describes Bob Bailey's innovative mapping principles aimed at better managing forest and other resources. Ecosystem management also requires better understanding of how to apply such principles to landscapes with many owners.

AMERICAN FORESTS' Forest Policy Center is conducting a series of regional-level workshops titled "Building Partnerships for Ecosystem Management on Forest and Range Lands in Mixed Ownership." Their purpose is to identify and explore options for achieving ecosystem-management goals on mixed-ownership lands. The discussions will consider regional differences in resource-management objectives, land-ownership patterns, and social, political, and economic concerns.

According to Al Sample, director of the Forest Policy Center, "Political and property boundaries rarely correspond to ecological boundaries. This suggests a need for far greater collaboration and coordination among adjacent landowners in their planning and management of forest and range lands and the protection of biological diversity, water quality, and other ecological values."

The workshops will build upon the results of a national conference held October 22-24, 1993, at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The conference included more than 100 representatives of federal and state agencies, forest industry, private nonindustrial forest landowners, consulting foresters, conservation organizations, congressional staff, and natural-resource schools from across the U.S.

The first workshop was held March 20-21 in Manchester, New Hampshire, drawing participants from New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. Future workshops will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado; St. Paul, Minnesota; Missoula, Montana; and Auburn, Alabama. For further information, contact Tony Cheng at [phone], ext. 218.

Norah Davis, former managing editor of American Forests, writes on resource issues from her home in Washington, DC.