Science Coordinator Organizes Conference Session

September 20, 2007

Thousands of miles of wildland roads are being removed across North America to mitigate their negative impacts. The U.S. Forest Service alone has decommissioned more than 30,000 miles, and yet, research related to road removal is just beginning to catch up with the practice.

In August, Adam Switalski organized a conference session at an international joint meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Ecological Restoration, bringing together five PhDs and other scientists from academia, agencies, and NGOs. The session was closely linked to the theme of the conference, “Restoration in a Changing World.” Its goals were to synthesize the current state of knowledge of road removal across landscape, watershed, and site-level spatial scales and to propose directions for future interdisciplinary research. Presenters examined the issue with a crowd of 150 peers. Previously, no session had addressed this topic.