FOREST PARK is in trouble. The 5,000-acre woodland on Portland’s Westside makes up half of the city’s parkland—yet it receives just half of one percent of the parks bureau’s budget. And what the park will look like in the future depends on who can afford to maintain it.

Biologist Nancy Broshot raised alarm bells recently when she released data from a startling report: A generation of trees is missing in Forest Park. Old trees are dying, like usual, but over the past decade new trees failed to grow.

Broshot, who is an associate professor at Linfield College’s Portland campus, hiked the forest counting young trees in 1993 and again in 2003. The second time around, she noticed that many of those young trees hadn’t survived. Nobody has been able to explain the mortality rates, says Broshot, but something is interrupting the natural order of things in Forest Park.

“I’m not ready to say the park is unhealthy and dying, but if these tendencies continue, then that bodes really ill for the park,” says Broshot. She will do another survey in 2013.

As trees disappear, Portland Parks and Recreation doesn’t have the money to finance replanting efforts. To manage Forest Park, the city bureau relies on a $125,000 grant from, of all places, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Since FEMA’s priority is preventing wildfire, not investigating mysterious tree death, the reforestation work focuses on fringes of the park that are closest to buildings. Also, FEMA gets to dictate what gets planted: mostly fire-resistant deciduous trees instead of fast-burning conifers like Douglas-fir.

Deciduous trees like the Bigleaf Maple now dominate areas of the park that were burned by forest fires in the past. With young conifers failing to appear and replanting focusing almost exclusively on deciduous trees, the park is moving further away from its natural state.

A recent City Club of Portland report on Forest Park lamented that conifers now dominate only 25 percent of the forest. “Still,” the report notes, “if the natural processes were allowed to unfold… we could see slow movement toward a forest with old-growth characteristics.”

“That’s possible, but not in our lifetime,” says Michelle Bussard, executive director of the Forest Park Conservancy, a nonprofit group that advocates for the park.

The conservancy puts around $250,000 a year of its own money into restoration and maintenance efforts, which include trail work and tree plantings.

“We work with hundreds of volunteers to plant new trees,” says Bussard. “Thank God for poor, starving college students.”

Parks and Recreation Director Zari Santner says that the combined expenditures of city agencies, Forest Park Conservancy, and volunteer hours to maintain Forest Park equal about $1 million a year.

Some of the city funds for Forest Park come from a surprising place: the sewer budget. Forest Park’s trees are crucial to controlling water runoff that could pollute local water.

“You need a healthy tree canopy to control runoff into the streams,” says James Allison, director of the Bureau of Environmental Service’s revegetation program, which works in Forest Park. “We partner with parks to control invasive plants, like ivy and clematis, that could bring down that canopy. The cost of prevention is literally pennies on the dollar.”

Human interference, dying trees, and invasive species have pushed the park past the point of self-sufficiency, say those who have studied it. Without better management, Forest Park might not be a forest for long.

“If you did nothing, it would eventually turn into Laurelhurst Park,” says Megge Van Valkenburg, chair of the City Club study group. “It would be a nice park, but it wouldn’t be a forest.”

The City Club report, which will be presented at the Governor Hotel on Friday, June 4, cites the parks bureau’s dwindling budget as it recommends transferring management of the park from city government to a regional authority.

Van Valkenburg phrased this view simply at a recent town hall meeting. “Maybe it comes down to acknowledging that the city can’t afford Forest Park.”

6 replies on “Can’t Save the Forest or the Trees”

  1. “Thank GOD for poor starving students?”What do they ummmmm get paid?An awful lot of pine nuts?Not knocking volunteers at all…..but they sure seem to get used these days.I say we run the ENTIRE government with volunteers and please folks…vote only for POOR candidates for government and save the blue collar middle class!!!

  3. As a consultant who worked on the fire risk reduction plan for Forest Park, and the author of a book on ecological restoration, I’d like to offer a few corrections to some of the assumptions in this article.

    1) Forest Park’s budget should not be compared on a per acre basis to other Portland parks. Natural areas require far less day to day maintenance than lawns and flower beds.

    2) No disrespect to Nancy Broshot intended, but much of Forest Park is in a “stem exclusion stage,” meaning that it is young enough to be overcrowded with smaller trees. Over time it is natural for many of these trees to die off. It may be a few decades before there is enough space, light, and nutrients available in the understory for new trees to be able to survive.

    3) For the reason above, “replanting” more trees may not make a lot of sense.

    4) The FEMA grant is not the main source of funds for managing the park. It is a short term source of funds to get some work done related to reducing fuels so that if a fire happens it will be less threatening to surrounding neighborhoods. Most natural parks are managed with a baseline budget and various grants.

    5) Maple is the most common tree in the park, and tends to be in areas previously logged because it sprouts from the stump. Alder tends to be more dominant in areas previously burned.

    6) The old growth issue is a bit complicated. Maple can live 300 or more years, so its entirely consistent to have both old growth AND a lot of maple. In fact, we used a study of the City of Corvallis watershed to illustrate this point. There is a large area down there that has old growth maple and fir growing in an area that was never logged. Much of Forest Park can grow into old growth with similar characteristics. Plus, there are parts of Forest Park that are best suited to become “old growth” Oregon white oak, a rare and important species that grows in the lower parts of the park near St Helens Highway.

    7) there is no scenario in which Forest Park would evolve into Laurelhurst Park. In fact, its best to think the opposite way. If we stopped mowing the lawns at Laurelhurst it would gradually come to resemble Forest Park, not the other way around.

    8) The biggest issue in Forest Park is invasive species. A lot more can and should be done to get rid of them, especially the ivy.

    9) Its probably true the city cannot afford to properly take care of Forest Park. Its equally true that there is no other regional agency that can afford this either. Metro does not have enough funding to take care of the natural areas it owns and manages. The City Club should follow up with a larger, regional study of natural area management that gets at the bigger question of managing the entire portfolio of forests, wetlands, prairies, and savannas we are collecting but don;t know how to take care of.

  4. Great response Mr. Apostol,
    In your opinion, where does Forest Park stand in terms of its stem exclusion stage? Is it closer to stand initiation, or understory re-initiation; or is it even possible for Forest Park to reach a true understory re-initiation stage given its myriad of invasive species problems, off-trail hiking, mountain bikes, off-leash dogs etc?

  5. Dean – Thanks for your thoughts. E-mail me at stefan at portlandmercury dot com and I’ll be glad to consult you in the future. In a situation this complex, some things will be overlooked in 750 words, but I’m happy to start more discussion.

Comments are closed.