ENHS Nature Trails January 2000 Article 1

This month's speaker: An interview with Matthew Kimble

How did you get interested in natural history? Did you have nature hobbies?
Like everyone, I like to walk in the woods, and to walk up streams of any size. I also love to bird watch and care for a large mixed flock ranging from chickadees to ravens at our Portland home. I photograph nature, and have recently had the opportunity to begin snorkeling and underwater photography.

...were parents involved?
Very much so. My earliest years were spent just at the edge of the city along Barber drive in Eugene. I explored the surrounding woods and watched the hawks circle overhead.
My parents taught me to be very observant of my environment. They also stressed the value of hypotheses and testing your own ideas with observations and experiments.

Are there teachers or other individuals who inspired you?
While I was in Eastside Elementary, my teachers took us camping in the old growth and out on nature walks every day the weather allowed.

Any inspirational travels? ...landmark experiences?
The first time that I visited the Sequoias in Kings Canyon, Sequoia National Park and Yosemite Valley it changed my perception of the role trees can play in the environment, through sheer size and weather effects, and through the obvious root network holding up bare alpine soils in the clear mountain air.
Throughout my life I was able to travel widely, especially in the West, and visit many of the great natural places preserved as Parks or Wilderness. Glacier National Park was a revelation, especially the scale of the glaciation and the rock strata in the mountains. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound during my time in Washington, D.C. brought the term "ecological restoration" into my awareness. With the end of the cold war, this seemed to me the next major need.

What led you to studies in Forestry?
My Uncle Joe Jacobson always encouraged me to become a scholar. My father always encouraged me to find a job a liked and that gave me some time outside. It has not been so much "forestry" that I have been pursuing, but rather ecological restoration.
The search for an effective yardstick to measure ecological health led me to comparisons of water sheds in different conditions. Streams integrate the watershed and therefore have been much studied as surrogates representing the health of the entire watersheds. I first looked this along the Oregon for my master's thesis. Then in the North Cascades for my doctoral dissertation.

Where did you get your education?
I attended schools in Eugene: Edison and Eastside Elementary. Roosevelt Jr. High School, South Eugene High School. I studied Political Science with an emphasis on ecological issues and movements at Yale University. After some time working for a conservation group, a congressional campaign and two congressmen I re-entered the academic track at the University of California, Berkeley. I studied wilderness and second growth watershed vegetation patterns on the Central Oregon Coast and received a Master's in Wildland Science. I have just completed my Ph.D. in Ecosystem Science from the Division of Ecosystem Science, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington. I was affiliated with both the Center for Streamside Studies and the Center for Urban Horticulture. My advisor was Dr. Kern Ewing, and I worked as part of his Ecological Restoration Lab.

What are you going to talk about?
The ecology of North Cascade streams and streamside areas, their biodiversity, species composition, and response to altered watershed conditions. I focus on instream macroinvertebrates and vegetation -- mainly bryophytes, and floodplain vegetation, as well as the substrates available to these organisms.

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