Dominique Bachelet Oral History Interview, December 12, 2017

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is December 12, 2017. We're at the Valley Library and I'm here with Dr. Dominique Bachelet, a professor in the Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering Program. Today we're going to talk about your research as it relates to global warming, but I'd like to start with your background: where were you born?

DOMINIQUE BACHELET: In Arras, France, north of Paris. If you do a triangle between Brussels, London, and Paris my hometown is pretty much in the middle of the triangle.

ET: And that's where you grew up?

DB: Mm-hmm [yes].

ET: What was it like growing up there, growing up in France?

DB: [Laughs] It was good food. It's a smallish town. It's about 100,000 people. It's in the middle of agricultural country. I had one grandfather who was a blacksmith, for example. One was an accountant in town. North of my hometown, instead of being ag, it was the old mine country, because the mines were very 00:01:00deep they were about to close. Only Polish people were able to or were gutsy enough to go and get the coal out and so there were a lot of Polish enclaves in that area with a lot of fun musical events and things like that, but also terrible accidents that happened when I was a kid, too, so it was, you can tell it was the end of an era.

ET: What did your parents do?

DB: My mom was working in the telephone company, so putting the first digital list of people who had phones, so that was kind of a fun era going digital. France was the first one to have these little mini tele, which were a little bit like the old Macs. Little boxes with a screen and that was replacing the telephone directory, so that was pretty neat. That was in the '70s, yeah. My dad 00:02:00started as a mechanic and became in charge of all the mechanics in that local Citroen garage in town. He was testing a lot of the new models on the freeway for the Citroen cars. Nobody had gone to university. I was the first in my family to do that. I don't have any siblings. I was the one and only in my family.

ET: What was your school experience like?

DB: I went to Catholic school, two different schools in my hometown. When I was 7 I went to the secondary school and was there until I turned 17, all-girls school and with nuns teaching us. There were non-nuns too, but very strict, hard-working, very much so. We had the reputation of being really good, so we had to maintain that, otherwise the nuns would descend upon us. But it was a 00:03:00good time. We were a good pack of friends, so it was good.

ET: Did you have someone who guided you towards university?

DB: Guided me to the university? No, but it was pretty much a given that unless you wanted to do a vocational thing like your parents you were pretty much going to the university next. So, not really. I had really good teachers, but I can't say that anybody really told me to go to the university. I was really interested in science and I really wanted to do research, so I went.

ET: You went to the university in Lille, is that correct?

DB: That's correct, yeah. It's about a 30-minute train ride from my hometown. I would take the train and go over there, and I rented an apartment in town over there and yeah went to class every day and came back for the weekend.

ET: How did you decide to study life science?

DB: I've always been interested in science, from as little as I was insects and worms I would bring all sorts of things home, to my mom's dismay. It was pretty obvious from the start that science was the way I was going to go. I hesitated with medicine, because I was really interested in immunology and surgery. I used to open all sorts of mice on the tables, which was already problematic for the people _______. Met a lot of people who were doing botany and that was the part of the science that I knew the least about. I had to write quite a bit about animals, so I thought, well, I should learn more about plants, so I went into plant biology for my masters in Lille.

ET: Why did you decide to pursue higher education?

DB: Good question. Let's see? Why did I do that? Obviously, I hadn't been doing 00:05:00any research when I was doing my masters, because you don't have the opportunity, but as soon as you start your Ph.D. you're given research projects, so I definitely wanted to do that. I moved to Paris to do that, to Paris 11, which is the southern suburbs of Paris. Met my advisor there who was just back from a stint with the International Biological Program in Saskatchewan, and so he was working on grasslands and was very interested in modeling and computer science and so we started working together and at the time I was working on migratory grasshoppers from Africa and how their swarming was determined by the water content of their food, and so did a project with three species from Africa and used all sorts of techniques that hadn't been used on that sort of insect. Anyway, went on with that for that for the first year. It was a pretty small case of research in the lab and then wanted to do a model and my advisor said if 00:06:00you really want to do a lot of computer science you should finish it in the U.S. and not stay here. And so, I packed up my bags and went to the University of West Virginia, WVU, which was the cheapest university in terms of tuition for foreign students at that U.S. at the time. In August '79 I arrived there with two suitcases and met Ann Bartuska, who was doing her Ph.D. there and Ann went up in the stratosphere of the forest service, which is always fun to see, a good friend. She taught me how to get a card, a Social Security Card, how to open a bank account and all that. I stayed with her I think for a couple of weeks before I got my own apartment and went on my feet and met my advisor, but he's a 00:07:00person I had corresponded to from France, and who was actually Ann's major advisor and was looking at decomposition in tropical forests. Then met Bill Hunt, who was a young professor and was doing a lot of simulation and so I was really interested in what he was doing, even though he was from Texas and I had a heck of a time understanding his accent. Started working more closely with him and talking about projects. He was leaving.

I arrived in August in Morgantown and he was leaving the next June for Fort Collins and asked me if I wanted to be on his project. Of course, I agreed and moved to Colorado and then met another person, Jim Detling, who had the project with typical research site at Pawnee Grasslands and studied being his graduate assistant and so I had the double advisor and working there on the role of 00:08:00grazing on the sort of blue grama grass, so all the biogeochemical cycling in the short grass prairie Colorado and it was a lot of fun working with all sorts of herbivores. I was really interested in the plant-animal interactions. The animals is where I had started, the plants I was still learning something about but how the two interacted in terms of cycles was really of interest to me. Climate was there first and foremost of course from the start.

ET: Did you speak English before you came to the U.S. and how was it as a researcher as non-native English speaker?

DB: Yeah, so in France we learn English pretty quickly. It's our second language, or at least in Northern France it definitely is. My mom was supposed to be an English teacher. After World War II there were several soldiers who stayed at my grandparents' house, so she was pretty fluent in English, so she always made me speak English. We went to England several times. I spent 3 00:09:00summers in England and two summers in the U.S. before I moved here, so I would say I was pretty good in English, nothing like I am now, but I could understand English, I'd say. Only the strong accent I had problems with. For a non-English speaker, there were ups and downs, but it was okay. When I was in West Virginia I made money serving as a translator for a group of African students for whom their first language was French, so I was helping them. They were doing a master's in agriculture. So, I was serving as their translator when they were there. So that was fun. But anyway, and also to make some extra money I did some translation of abstracts for science papers and things like that at the time.

But to do research is like all the papers are written in English anyway, so no 00:10:00matter what you need to at least read English if not speak it fluently.

ET: In terms of computer modeling language, what were your-

DB: At the time is was Fortran. That was my second language for Colorado State University Ph.D. requirements. It was pretty funny.

ET: Did you enjoy learning that?

DB: Oh, I love computers and programming at the time, yeah. I've always liked math and so computers was just translating an equation into a code and then running it many times, which was a lot of fun.

ET: Did you teach while you were in Colorado?

DB: Yeah, I was a TA for-I forget how many classes I was TA for. Some introduction classes and in simulation modeling for Bill Hunt. I was his TA for at least 2 semesters.

ET: What was the cultural environment like at CSU with respect to your environmental interests?

DB: With respect to my environmental interests? Well, it was great. I mean, the 00:11:00Pawnee Grasslands were right there. At the time the natural resource ecology lab was an old building on campus that kind of brought people from different departments. There was no ecology department. There was nothing that was kind of like now that would be ecosystem science, so the professors came from different departments: rangeland, botany, and plant pathology. I ended up getting my degree in botany and plant pathology just because that was the easiest way, the way my two advisors were. We were a bunch of young grad students. There was Dave Schimmel, Beth Holland, Jill Baron, Dennis Ojima. We all share in the same rooms. It was pretty tight. When Beth was opening her drawer in her desk, I had to move into my desk, so she could get things out of the drawer, but we had great interactions between the professors and the students. Professors there was 00:12:00Bill Parton and Dave Coleman, so every week we had a brown bagger where the students would give 10, 15-minute presentations and there were two students and one professor who would prepare something for 30 minutes. We had an hour brown bagger to share the science that was being done there. I was very dynamic. I think the professors were all pretty young, except, well, Dave Coleman was not so young anymore, but still. It was very, very active. A lot of really good relationships between students and professors, very ongoing all the time and then Friday afternoons there was always a social. We had really easy access to the professors doing research, so that was really valuable.

ET: Then you stayed in the U.S. when you were done with your Ph.D.?

DB: Yeah, so just before I finished I did my defense I went back to France to 00:13:00take an exam, the national exam, because my professor in Paris really wanted me to come back and work with him. It's a national exam. Even now, it's pretty limited the number of people who are picked. The year I took the exam they were picking one person and I finished second, so it was like [mouth noise]. So, I went back and did my defense and then moved to Thailand for 4 months and then was teaching computer science over there and then I applied for postdocs and got two offers and so I went to California. The two offers were in California, so that was easy in terms of location but picked one. Called my advisor in Colorado and said okay, who should I go work for? Who's the best person? Who does the best science? So that's who I picked.

ET: That was desert and ecosystem modeling?

DB: Yeah, with Wes Jarrell in Riverside, California at UCR. I was there for a 00:14:00couple of years working on the nitrogen fixers and mesquite trees in Sonoran Desert looking at how is the decoupling between the nitrogen fixation at the bottom next to the phreatic zone where the mesquite has very deep roots that hits the phreatic zone, so the groundwater. Then there's rhizobium nodule next to the water so it's a very moist zone, picks up the nitrogen, natural, I mean gases, nitrogen and moves that into the tissues of the plant and the leaves become really high in nitrogen, they fall on the ground and there's high accumulation of nitrogen underneath a canopy until there's a rain. Then the fine roots which are dormant during dry times come to life and start dealing with the nitrogen that's going to be leeching from the dead leaves underneath the tree. But there's a true decoupling between their low root system, moist root system, and their very dry upper canopy.

The leaves are so rich in nitrogen that you have a lot of insects that go and pick up the moisture and nitrogen that are in the leaves and you can be sitting under a mesquite in the middle of a very hot summer and it's going to be raining sugar because the aphids are going to pick those leaves. It's a very interesting thing. We were in a pretty neat team and we were walking, we worked in Palm Springs and found some of the first nodules. There was an arroyo and so all the floods that was during the monsoon had carved out really steep bank and you could see the roots of mesquite and we found nodules very, very deep-they were 6 meters deep or something like that. We knew that they were there, but we had no real data, so we actually found them, which was really interesting.

ET: Then you went to Man Tech Environmental?

DB: No, First I went to New Mexico State. Because I was working on the nitrogen 00:16:00fixing model. Jim Reynolds who was working-I moved to New Mexico State University was in the process of putting together a desert model, so I went over there and worked 2 years over there and worked with Pete Virega, who was a soil scientist, now retired, at New Mexico State. So, I spent two years there. Then I applied for a job with Man Tech in Corvallis at the EPA lab. That's where I started working on UV-B impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. So, I started there September '88 and the Montreal Protocol was signed pretty much immediately so we got a phone call from Washington, D.C., saying okay forget ozone. We got that under control but this climate change thing, can you switch to climate change? It's like, okay, we'll switch to climate change. Then of course they told me well, we're not going to do terrestrial ecosystem we're going to do rice patties 00:17:00in Asia. Welcome to the EPA. It's just like suddenly the project theme had changed dramatically, but in their mind, I was a grass line ecologist, and rice being a grass I was right in my expertise. So, worked with that project until '94. Traveled to Asia quite a bit to meet with everybody doing all sorts of experiments. The main fieldwork was done in the Philippines. We had growth chambers and methane emission chambers. Methane part of the project was pretty much instrumented and analyzed by a German group and then all the simulation modeling that I was working on was also led by Dutch people who had a whole suite of agriculture models. I was interested in putting an ecosystem model together. They were interested in the crop and yield part, so it was a good 00:18:00association. Then all sorts of CO2 chambers and it was-oh, I see his face and I can't remember his name, who did all the CO2 work at the Institute of Rice Research in the Philippines, but we worked with people in China, people in Japan, people in Vietnam and then a few scientists here in the U.S. It was a big project.

ET: How did you feel about working in an agricultural-?

DB: It was fun. Yeah, there's a lot more data for Ag than it is for natural systems, so it was great. There was lots of numbers to play with, to do the model with. We tried four different models. It was a good team with lots of interacting people, so it was a really good learning experience and then of course at the end when we wrote the final report we gave all the data to an economist who pretty much told us that the biology, yeah, sure but what's the 00:19:00most important thing in terms of the future of rice was the price of rice on world markets, and of course the social unrest or peace in the countries that produce the most rice. That was kind of a sobering thought, but logical.

ET: What did you think of Corvallis when you arrived here?

DB: I thought it was a very small town. I was used to more I'd say entertainment possibility-I love theater and so does my husband. We used to go to the theater in Las Cruces, even though it's a small town too, they had a top-notch theater. It was a little disappointing coming to Corvallis. The theater scene was pretty poor at the time, but the folk scene was pretty neat.

We pretty much got into the Corvallis Folklore Society, attended a lot of their 00:20:00music events. We learned a lot about folk singing and folk singers, I should say, but anyway it was nice to be able to go to Portland and enjoy the big city. But we love the outdoors, so that was good to be close to the ocean and close to mountains. Of course, it rains a lot so that was after New Mexico and California it was really tough to get used to these 9 months of rain. That's always been the down side of Corvallis. But very small community. Everybody knows everybody, so it's kind of interesting.

ET: You transitioned to OSU from Man Tech?

DB: Correct, across the street, yeah.

ET: What did you think about that transition returning to academia?

DB: Well, it didn't make much difference, because I mean it's not like OSU paid 00:21:00my salary. I was still on the research project, so what happened was Ryan Neilson was working on the EPA and he was looking at climate change, but on terrestrial systems, on natural systems, and so I had already worked on the climate change models and projections for the rice project, and he was looking at climate trends and so he was working with this student Chris Daly at the time was designing PRISM at the time. Jim Lenihan was a bioclimatologist and so he asked me if I was interested in putting together the biogeochemical part of the equation. I said sure if you don't mind Centurian [?]. I know Centurian [?] which was what I had my Ph.D. with. The three of us-Jim, Chris, and I-sat down and started designing a model that could actually look at climate impacts from a climate perspective by the evolution perspective with Jim and soon after with 00:22:00fire. So, Jim took Linehan took over the fire bit. For me it wasn't a very big difference, except EPA of course has a lot more administrative BS going with it so it was a lot lighter to be at OSU. It has its own, but EPA had been transitioning. There had been a big shift in their administration, so we had a few waves to float over at the time, which were not the most, the most easiest ones to deal with but times change and anyway. But for me in terms of research I was continuing doing things I liked to do, being with a computer and data analysis and equations and yeah it was a pretty smooth transition.

ET: Was the model that you were referring to was that the MC1 Vegetation Model?

DB: Yeah, MC1, yep. My husband got a job in New Hampshire for a year replacing somebody and teaching over there. I moved over there and worked in John Aber's 00:23:00lab for a year. That was really, really cool to be on the east side and working a bit for the folks from the Marion Biological Lab at Woods Hole, and they were developing their own model there. The east coast influence and what they were doing, and John had a really good Ph.D. student, Scott Oliver, who actually took over John's lab when he retired and was very interested in nitrogen and had put together a really nice model with John. It was interesting to see different aspects of approaching the impacts of climate change on terrestrial systems, especially in the east coast forest, which I didn't know too much about. I only looked pretty much like on the other side of the Atlantic. I'm more familiar with what we have here.

ET: So, going back to your arrival at OSU, you started out in the department of bioresource engineering?

DB: Ag Engineering at the time.

ET: Okay.

DB: It was Agricultural Engineering.

ET: What was the culture of that program like at that time? Has it shifted?

DB: At the time I was working on rice, so I fit pretty right in. Was working with a few people really interested in crops, but the department has also been very varied. So, you have people with different backgrounds and different interests, so it's always been pretty interesting to see everybody's vision of a particular problem, because you get very different perspectives. It's a great department head and people are very friendly and inclusive, so it was nice. I never had an office there, mind you. My office was in the forestry sciences lab because I was working with Neilson and his team, so they had an office space for me over there.

ET: Is that the Conservation Biology Institute? That was separate.

DB: No. The forestry sciences lab on Jefferson Street, where the forest service folks are.

ET: Right. Were you teaching when you arrived or just researching? When you 00:25:00first arrived at OSU?

DB: When I first arrived, I taught one class of global ecology with a colleague from EPA, Hermann Gucinski, who moved to forest service afterwards and Dave Turner. The three of us took one class. Then I taught a few classes for the BEE. I taught proposal writing and then giving speeches and things like that, presentations. Those were required classes in the department at the time, so I taught those two.

ET: When did you get involved with Conservation Biology Institute?

DB: That was in 2009. I first went to the Nature Conservancy in 2007, so I left Ron Neilson's team in 2006 and then I joined TNC in 2007, spent a year and a half with them, realized quickly they were not interested in supporting science. 00:26:00They were interested in outreach and other young businesses, and so I left there to continue doing science and research and then I talked to James Strittholt who was apparently interested in having me come over and do modeling and climate change. CBI did not have climate change research before that, and they had just received a grant from the Cressey Foundation to put together a climate center, an online climate center, so Jim paid half of my salary the first year to work on that.

ET: You were affiliated with OSU throughout that whole time?

DB: Yeah, sure. Yep, same department. Changed names a couple times.

ET: You worked on the data basin component as well?

DB: The data basin as this climate center, so we created the climate center within the data basin, so yeah.

ET: Can you talk about the importance of that in accruing data from I guess across-?

DB: It's a pretty lofty goal. It's to be able to centralize spatial data sets that are relevant to people who do conservation, mostly, but also anybody who is interested in looking at what's out there and so when it started it really was one of the first ones to make all these data sets available with good documentation. The goal was also to create a network, so that if you were interested in a particular data set, the name of the person who had created the data is available and you can contact that person and then you can start interacting. The even loftier goal way back when was we were going to have a review panel of experts who would actually look at every single new data set coming into data basin and give an evaluation, just like when you submit a paper to a journal.

Unfortunately, that never came to pass, but we put together a couple of groups that were supposed to keep an eye on the content of those special data sets and 00:28:00not only their relevance but also doing a good QA/QC of value of the data. But the data basin separates the special data sets that have been published versus those that are not. So that gives a clue that some of them have never been checked by peers, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. It would have been nice to have this panel of experts to actually check and comment on new data sets but given the fact that at the beginning it was just like pouring in, it would have been a tough job. But anyway, somebody should have done that. Should have.

ET: You also got involved with an intergovernmental panel on climate change?

DB: Involved. Yeah. Well, when I was working on rice they asked me to be a coauthor on one of the chapters, because our rice models were producing a bunch 00:29:00of climate change impacts. Cynthia Rosenzweig was doing her work, she was gone. She was doing her Ph.D. at the time, so we were the other team working on climate change impacts on crops. Of course, our crop was just rice. She was doing all the other crops wheat and things like that, so she was I believe first-named author at the time on the Ag, or somebody working with her, on the Ag sector, and so because I was working on that I was coauthor on the chapter. Then I volunteered to be reviewers on the next one. The first one that I participated in was '95 and then the rest was recently, including the one that we had the Nobel Peace Prize for it, that so many people were excited about, even though there's about 3,000 of us that got the prize for that piece of work.

ET: Do you anticipate continuing to be involved with future-?

DB: Oh, sure. I mean, as far as I still understand what's being done, yes. Sure. But this year I focused on the SOCCR report rather than the IPCC report, but the IPCC's coming up anyway. I'm always the reviewer, usually, on the terrestrial impacts and for the North American chapter.

ET: And you returned to France a couple times, it looks like, as a visiting scientist?

DB: Oh, yes. That's right. I went to Phillipe Ciais's lab in Paris. Phillipe is one of the lead global modelers, only publishes in Nature and Science, so that tells you what level he is. But super nice guy. He asked me if I was interested in coming and working with him on the fire model for their dynamic global vegetation model, which is at [?], and so I spent a few months there, three months I think in Paris working with him and then what Steve when was doing his 00:31:00postdoc in Toulouse, I was working on a Mediterranean model, using actually John Aber's model.

ET: Did you ever consider returning to France?

DB: Oh, yes. Especially this year, to be honest. Yes. I actually still have an email in my inbox, because the French government is offering grants for people to go back, so I have an email that says okay when do you want to come and for how long? I have to deal with that.

ET: They're trying to recruit their academics back?

DB: Yeah, well, if you want to do climate change, they say, you know you can do it in France since you can't do it here. Given the fact that all my contacts have told me that they can't do climate change research anymore, it's like if I want to continue doing what I've been doing for the last 25 years, I better go somewhere that will let me and fund my research.

ET: How have your modeling tools changed through your career, in terms of coding language?

DB: Yeah, coding language has evolved tremendously for sure. We started with I think it was Fortran III or Fortran IV and we are now at Fortran XC? It's still in Fortran but it's a very different beast from what it was. We didn't have objector-oriented programming at the time, so C++ was unknown. That has changed quite a bit. I remember when I did my Ph.D. I had a deck of cards. Because I was a student, we used to do batch jobs in the evening and so we'd give the deck of cards to the people at the computer center and you'd go back in the morning and you'd have the accordion pages of paper with all the results from your model and if you have mistyped a number you could start again [laughs]. It was a very slow process. Things have dramatically changed, which is great.

ET: You look at a lot of carbon or nutrient cycling through systems. How do you incorporate that with vegetation modeling?

DB: We grow plants and as they grow they accumulate carbon. For every atom of carbon there is an associated number of nutrient atoms and we've been focusing on nitrogen but that's one of also other of the things that are missing in our model. We've never been able to really calibrate it with real data for the nitrogen cycle, the full nitrogen cycle. It would be nice if we had global data sets, especially time series of nitrogen disposition, nitrogen fixation. Those numbers are very difficult to find. Deposition you can find because it's associated with pollution but it's not a very long time series. You have to make 00:34:00assumptions. We started our models in 1895 and we go to 2100, so there's a period in the past that we don't have anything about. We can make some assumptions but in the future it's really difficult to go that way and really be realistic or believable when you assume a particular amount of nitrogen deposition, the pollution level's difficult to tell. It depends on what's going to happen on the policy level. These seem to be changing every 8 years or so, so it's difficult to tell what comes next. Anyway, so our model is fully, you have vegetation types, we have all the carbon pools and then we have fire that modifies the carbon pools and if you change the canopy and the cover you change the type of vegetation that is there.

In other words, we have succession after a fire.

ET: How did your research go back into natural systems and away from agricultural systems of rice fields?

DB: Just, you know when I was doing my graduate study I was looking at grassland, native grasslands, short grass prairie. It was a matter of learning about how forests grow, and I was in Neilson's team and we just put it together. A plant is a plant. I know a woody plant from an herbaceous plant, but overall those are pretty standard processes. If you do any studies in biology, you always learn about these things. It's just a matter of putting it together.

ET: What are the difficulties associated with modeling, say a natural landscape versus an agricultural system?

DB: Well, an Ag system especially when you do a crop, you plant it, so you know when it starts and then you harvest it and you know when it ends. Natural 00:36:00systems they grow throughout. If you live in Oregon you know perfectly well there's photosynthesis happening in the winter, so you can't just say in the winter everything is dormant nothing happens. There are things that are happening. The roots are changing. People have been monitoring plants, but you always miss something. There's always something you're not 100% sure about. For example, plants have roots and roots exude material but the exudation rate from roots is very difficult to measure. You can measure it in a lab but it's not the same as when it's in the soil in real life. So, you have this number that you think is an approximately correct. You look at the literature. You see people who have measured it. You can find a few papers, specifically old ones because now it's very a fine few people who want to do that sort of thing. If your model fails, you don't know if that number was wrong and so if you can turn that one 00:37:00off it's something else in your model that you have the wrong number for or the wrong process. You forgot something. The challenge is to really understand the processes and natural systems, because they're the ones that everybody looks at. Like photosynthesis, the [unintelligable], there are millions of articles about how to put together an equation for photosynthesis, but if you stop looking at root growth, turnover, exudation, those are pretty rare, especially reliable papers because it's hard work. There's nothing easy and the techniques always have flaws and limitations. In the old days, in the '20s, there were professors who had grad students who dug up roots and with carefully with paint brush separated all the fine roots to look at cloud of all those roots for a particular plant. That's the kind of thing that nobody will do any more. Lidar is supposed to help but it's not quite the same. I'm hoping that the new 00:38:00satellite imagery, but maybe not satellite, but the visualization things that can be done from airplanes or drones can actually be designed. Maybe in 20 years we'd have really good tools to have the level of details that will help us understand-maybe not put all the details in the model but understand the processes that we might be missing, especially since everything is changing these days. Everything we've known based on what we've observed in the 20th century needs to be revised, seriously. So, lots to do.

ET: How do you incorporate human decisions on the landscapes.

DB: Ah, that's the fun part. We just started working with our model with land use a few years ago. We had a big project with the USGS and they wanted us to use land use. The problem with land use is you can look at an image and it tells you where the fields are, where the plantations versus natural forest are. But 00:39:00to know how they're managed, what you need to put in the model: it's like have they been thinned, in terms of forest? If they were replanted, were they seeded or was it seedlings and was there herbicide, how did that affect the plants that were around it? For grasslands, it's the same. Was there prescribed burning? How many heads of cattle were there? How much of the native ungulates came and grazed with everything else? What was the population of nematodes or you know root weasels... there's a lot of things going on. Biology's very complex. You're always going to miss something. Of course, the model is not there to represent reality. It's to synthesize the knowledge you have and see if you really understand how the processes work. If the model doesn't work, then it's interesting because then you need to dig deeper. The problem these days is everybody believes models. They're great tools, and they're made to stretch your mind.

The problem is a lot of people are doing the exact opposite. They're supposed to 00:40:00give you the means to look beyond what your eyes can see.

ET: Do you find it easier to incorporate fire, natural disturbance, into a model compared to say human impact? Is it similar?

DB: I wouldn't say that. Again, if we put agricultural land use, we can actually have calendars of crops and we know what crops are going to be planted and things like that. At least in the past we had a pretty good idea. In the future, it's total guesswork. Obviously, we don't know anything. We don't have a clue what's going to happen 20 years from now, what's going to be growing in the Willamette Valley. Lots of people have ideas but we don't know, especially if California has a drought they won't be able to grow any of their fruit and vegetables. In terms of wildfires, our fire was the first one that was designed to be dynamic. We grow the plant, we grow the pools of carbon. We have 00:41:00thresholds of how much fuel there is alive and dead and how moist they are. Then we determine the severity of the fire. In the future, it will depend a lot on the response of plants to CO2, which for some species there's been enough experiments that we have an idea of how that's going to be responding. For others, we don't have a clue, because we've never done the experiment. The experiments have been done on a limited number of species. Lots of unknowns still on the response to that and of course population density's increasing, so the number of fire ignitions, the timing of the ignitions and the location of the ignitions by humans are totally unpredictable.

Natural fires we know that there's a season when it's warm and dry that's where you might get lightening, you can pretty much, there's good correlations there. When it's a person who makes a fire in the middle of an area where lightning 00:42:00cannot reach or whatever and in the middle of a season where things are still fairly green but there's a wind but suddenly the fire will carry. We can't predict that. In California, the majority of fire are human-started, so it's really difficult to simulate the future of that. When Oregon triples its population in 20 years, what's going to happen? Where are the people going? Are they going to be smoking in the forests on the coast range? Things like that. But with the warmer, dryer conditions as projected for the future, I think where you're going to have people there's going to be a higher fire risk. On a global basis, we just published a paper with a bunch of young, European students who dedicated their life to document all the fire models that are being used. We showed that globally, the trend for future fire is down, because there's more urban area, there's more Ag lands, so less likely possibilities to have fires. 00:43:00Of course, the natural land getting warmer and dryer will burn, that's what we're seeing this year, but it's just in general more people means it would end up being more destroying the natural lands and so admitting the fire risk there. Different types of fires.

ET: How has working with land management agencies influenced your research directions? Is it primary with funding, because you also do training on using models, right?

DB: When I joined the Nature Conservancy and then Conservation Biology Institute, my goal was really to improve the science communication. Because I worked on models, we published the IPCC reports, but the managers don't have time to read. They don't have time to listen to our presentation. We use jargon that they don't get, which I totally understand. Especially when I joined TNC 00:44:00that was really, I was hoping to stay a lot longer and really work with these people, because they're the largest private landowner in the world. Their ownership is just tremendous. If you wanted to really interact with people working on the ground, this was a good place to be. Turns out, it wasn't, but anyway, at CBI we designed several web tools to actually provide the data to the managers hoping that they could use it in their reports. Until last year, they could, now it seems very jeopardized. I worked for forest service people. I worked with BLM. The forest service is an interesting entity, because they have a research branch and a management branch, so you're pretty much a fifth wheel as a researcher coming in the project for the forest service, because they've got really experts in their research branch, so it's a little harder to work with the managers for the forest service. BLM doesn't have a research grant and it's been a joy to work with BLM managers who are really eager to get the information.

Super busy people. Lots of land, few people to manage this and so very eager to 00:45:00get the information from you and get something they can use to improve or just be aware of what might be happening soon to their land. Worked with the park service. Park service works very closely with the USGS, of course. USGS have some of the best scientists in natural resource management, and so it's really great to work with the USGS people, especially if you find a group that kind of meshes with you and we don't step on any toes, but you actually complement each other. That's happened in a couple of projects. That was really cool. The funding is, of course, depends on what agency you work with. It's been great to work with these people. Now it's getting tougher this year. The problem with NSF is when you get a grant or some of the grants they don't want an application. I'm very interested in application because I've been doing science most of my 00:46:00life and science doesn't getting applied easily. It gets misinterpreted and it's really extremely frustrating after working for 25 years in climate change to see how misinterpreted the work of all these climate models is just-they work so hard and they try to do such a good job and those are fantastic tools and they are really being given too much negative advertisement.

ET: So, from your work with these different land management agencies, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, have you formed your own ideas about how land could be managed in the future with respect to climate change?

DB: I'm not a manager. I could tell people what to do, but it wouldn't make much sense. Managers know their land. I can bring what I know about the processes that I understand, and I can show them what the data explains or their 00:47:00limitation of the data sets that we're providing, so they can make their own opinion. We learn from them quite a bit. They have constraints. They have constraints of the amount of funding they have to do the things they have to do on their land. They have constraints in terms of the number of people available to apply whatever techniques they decide to go with. Even if they know what to do by listening to our stories, saying oh this is relevant to what I would like to do on my land. But if they don't have the resources they can just provide a sheet to their supervisor saying well, given this, we would love to be able to do this particular treatment, but they may or may not get the resources to do it. In general, I never tell people what to do on their land. I know what to do in my garden, that's bad enough [laughs].

ET: I have a final set of questions related to climate change, but I did want to 00:48:00ask you about your water color art. You're an artist as well. Is that something you've been doing your whole life?

DB: Yes, pretty much. Water color, maybe not, but drawing. My dad was a very good artist and my great grandfather was an artist, a true artist, but anyway. That was a turn of the century of the 20th century. It's very relaxing and it's something that flushes my brain out. I don't think about anything else when I do that. It's very enjoyable. It's quick. A lot of people are afraid of watercolor because there's a lot of looseness and when you work with water you can have surprises. It doesn't really matter to me. I love to play with water, but it's really fun to see what happens. It's a little bit like a natural system. So, you put water and colors together and see the blending and things like that and you 00:49:00always get something that's different from where you think you were going to. It's always exciting to see the results, but yeah for me it's just I need it for sanity's sake.

ET: Different kind of modeling.

DB: Different kind of modeling, yes [laughs].

ET: So, what were your earliest conversations on climate change like and how have those dialogues shifted over time?

DB: So, I remember in '88-yeah, so I started in '88, so maybe in '89 or '90 I put together a paper that was comparing all the GCM projections together and my colleague, soon to be team leader, Ron Neilson, reviewed that paper. He told me that I was comparing oranges and apples and that this was never going to be published and this was not the way to go.

A few years later everybody was doing it, and that was the way he ended up doing 00:50:00it too. At first, we were learning what were these GCM, these large climate models, how can we deal with it, how can we use them? We were learning a lot. As biologists, we always wanted to use them for our own purposes, but they were designed to look at the globe temperatures, so not at all to look at what was happening to a small forest or grassland in a small area of a state. The scaling issues has always been a huge, huge problem, a "problem." As we've been going through a climate change world, the GCM, the General Circulation Models, have actually increased in spatial resolution and so they're getting closer, although how close they're going to get I don't know, but we know a lot more about how to compare models to each other, but they're such complex beasts and it's really 00:51:00challenging. As people start linking the vegetation and the ocean and the atmosphere, these models are getting more and more complex. I remember at the end of the IBP, the International Biology Program, in the '70s, one of the things that had happened, and they were very complex models, and nobody knew why we got the answers we got because it was so complicated to go backwards to figure out what was the real trigger. There's always that danger. We always want to put a lot of details, and sometimes the details-they're important at the local scale and for people who are really interested in that aspect-but to simulate the future, it may not be so important.

But then again, butterfly wing on one part of the world... anyway, things have changed. The biologists have been talking a lot closer with the climate modelers, so we actually share information a little bit easier. There's still 00:52:00plenty of jargon we don't get. There's still a lot of assumption that the biologist and climatologist have they don't necessarily share, not because they don't want to but because they don't think about it. We need to have more conversation to really understand what we each assume, each part of each team. But at the time, we were scientists. We developed all of this and we were trying to do our best, and all this media and political thing started on the side and we really didn't pay attention to it. It was just like whatever. It just mushroomed into something that's very unpalatable. We don't quite understand what the big deal is. It's like scientists have always disagreed and will continue to disagree, but that's how we learn. But making that to the level of disagreement that we have now and climate deniers who believe and not believe. It's just science, we're just trying to do our best. Those models are not 00:53:00perfect. Of course, they're not. Again, they're tools. They're the best tools we have, so it's kind of stupid to say-you know it's like I have a car, but I do use my bicycle so it's just like I don't see what the point is. It's just like everything is accused.

ET: What kind of policy changes would you like to see happen within the U.S.?

DB: You don't want me to answer that one [laughs]. Let's say that if we rolled back the time about a year ago we were on track. I wish we were still-we are signatories of the Paris Agreement, no matter what is said. This country signed the agreement, so we can't just walk out by the way. I just hope that the next president will pay attention to the future and have a vision and line up with the rest of the world, renewables and redistribution and conservation of resources. That should be first. Conservation of resources should be the number 00:54:00one priority in this country.

ET: What changes to public education do you think can help Americans better understand climate change, or change their behavior?

DB: Yeah, so public education. That's an interesting question, depending at what level you're talking about. There's been a lot of polls and we've seen that science teachers are not totally cognizant of the science. I think that's actually what we say are stone gardens, the scientists who do research. We've been using jargon, we've been submitting papers in journals that are not read by your average teacher, obviously. We haven't worked with the media very much, and now we're in a situation where we don't have many scientific journalists for the big newspapers and the internet gives you all sorts of not reliable information.

It's very difficult to sift through. Young people have a tendency to be in social media more in encyclopedias, and so I think getting young people involved 00:55:00in observation, in monitoring. There's a lot of talk about citizen science for the last 10 years. I think getting the children to pay attention, to keep track of what's been happening through their little lives to see the changes. Again, start to get them interested in the outdoors, curious about the changes, not afraid but curious so that the understand what's going on. I think the missing bit in the outdoor bit as just as scientists we need more data because things are changing, and we don't know what direction it's going to take, so it's really important that we pay attention to what's going on and the younger generation is the best way. They need to really record what they know, what they see today so that when they become adults 20 or 30 years from now they'll be able to understand what has happened. Unfortunately, the funding for monitoring 00:56:00is going down the tubes, so that's also a shameful situation, especially in this country. Also, translational science is an article that just came out. Toni Morelli on the east coast, she seems to be the leader for that. There's a huge lack there. We have the scientists and we have the general public, or the managers, and there's very little real communication. So, the translation bit is missing. It's something you don't learn at school, even at OSU there's no class that explains how to do translational science and it's teaching people to do presentations that are not boring, to stop putting bullet points with a gazillion, or tables with 15-these are things that we've always said but to interact with the public and to write letters to the editor is to keep your vocabulary simple, to focus on things that are important instead of arguing with people who don't agree with what you think, it's really showing examples of 00:57:00things that are happening, focusing on the positive.

There's a lot of happy things that are happening around the world. Climate change is always painted as something dramatic that's going to kill species and things like that. There's also going to be opportunities and so focusing on that and also the tremendous opportunity for young people to actually have so much to do to understand the changes and see how society can deal with the changes. The education sector has a lot to-but I think the burden on the scientists is tremendous. We really need to be cognizant of what we do and being able to translate it into clear wording. There are a few people who work on that but not enough. There's a person, Peter-what's his last name? He's a storyteller. His father was a professor at UW and he's an actor. He goes on stage and talks about 00:58:00salmon. His show is salmon people. He tells stories from salmon to the Indian, the salmon people, going through all the different animals and plants in the forest and so it's a very charming story about what's happening from the stream all the way to the forest and people love it and get the idea and it's a story. He's part scientist through his dad, who's very rigorous, but he designs his stories to actually tell people what's happening. Another person in Nevada, in University of Reno, he's a lit teacher and professor there and he tells stories about the desert and about the great basin. Again, he writes books that are really humorous, but you also learn about what's happening in the desert by reading the whole story. You don't have to antagonize people or bore them to death with numbers to actually make them understand how important those natural 00:59:00systems are. It's a huge challenge and I wish OSU would have a program on translational science, and I'll be asking a few people about that.

ET: Are you hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change?

DB: I'm very hopeful for the planet itself. I think plants and animals, they may not be exactly the same as what we know today, but I think they know what they're doing. Nature has a tendency to actually react and survive. What our society's going to do with it is another story, whether we're going to blow up the planet or actually modify genetically every being on this planet so there will be only one genome at the end-I'm not a genetically modified advocate whatsoever or assisted migration. I think we are in general what humans have 01:00:00done has not been that successful. We always have a good intention. We do things. We think we're God and we can change things for the better, but in general we regret those things like bringing rabbits in Australia or whatever. I know a lot of people are well-intentioned, but I don't trust that very much. I've seen a lot of examples of adaptation that are happening. I see migrations happening. But I see fragmentation of the landscape limiting these migrations. I see pesticides killing a lot more than any rise in temperature. I think the human impacts are negative in general versus the climate, which I think gives enough leeway to plants and animals to actually deal with it. Sure, we have plants that will die and animals that will die but it's not something that's 01:01:00brand new. I'm very hopeful for the planet as whole, as long as we don't ruin it. I think our species is exponential and eventually our species will be extinct, and the earth will be a lot better as long as we let it.

ET: Well, on that note [laughs].

DB: [Laughs].

ET: Thank you for participating in this project.

DB: You're welcome.

ET: I appreciate your time.

DB: Thank you.