Undaunted, Grad Students Return to the Field After Wildfires

Young researchers see the wildfires that paused their field work in Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest as lessons for the future

By Marina Richie
Wildlife Science
Dec 18, 2024

Nina Ferrari climbs an old-growth Douglas fir in H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest before the fires.

LIGHTNING STRUCK LOOKOUT RIDGE in Oregon’s western Cascade Range on August 5, 2023. At first, flames crept slowly up the steep and remote terrain within the 15,800-acre H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. That changed a week later when a heat wave hit and winds gusted. The fire spread fast. Graduate students and other scientists packed up their gear and prepared to evacuate.

In the early days of the Lookout Fire, Tatiana Latorre coughed on smoke as she collected adult aquatic insects in sticky traps near shady, crystalline creeks. Chris Cousins waded after rare Cascade torrent salamanders for a genome project, intent on gathering data while he still could. Nina Ferrari worried about the fate of centuries-old Douglas firs she climbed to study canopy-dwelling songbirds. The three Ph.D. students from Oregon State University (OSU) knew time was short and that more than their dissertations were at stake. They’d come to care deeply about these towering groves—managed jointly by the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, OSU and Willamette National Forest—where, prior to the fire, shafts of sunlight filtered down through firs, cedars and hemlocks; spider webs threaded between ferns and rhododendrons; and black bears padded across fallen logs.

As of late September 2023, a combination of firefighting and fall rains had contained the blaze. By then, two-thirds of Andrews had burned, with some of the highest intensity fire located within the forest’s 6,500 acres of old growth—a rarity in heavily logged Oregon. The resulting mosaic reflected a fire-evolved ecosystem and one that would be threatened again in 2024, when the Ore Fire broke out west of Andrews on July 16. The three grad students, who had returned to continue their field work, evacuated once more.

Latorre, Cousins and Ferrari spoke with National Wildlife® about their initial grief, their postfire research and how they stay resilient as they embark on scientific careers in a time of planetary crisis.

A collage containing photos of Tatiana Latorre before and after the fire.

In advance of the fires, Tatiana Latorre (above left) inspects sticky traps to learn more about aquatic insect dispersion. Although the Lookout Fire blazed through several of her field sites (above right, in August 2023), Latorre sees the altered landscape as a chance to observe the impacts of a high-intensity fire.

Success in a warming world

A Colombia native on a Fulbright grant, Latorre, 42, is pursuing her Ph.D. in wildlife and conservation science. She studies the adult caddisflies, mayflies and stoneflies that venture from streams into forests amid a warming climate and the factors that influence their success—temperature, habitat quality, natural corridors linking brooks—as well as the health of the food webs dependent on them.

“The Lookout Fire was really sad for me, but there is now opportunity to see what happens after a high-intensity fire,” she says. “When you work with animals and plants, you are studying far more than the present moment.”

Growing up in Bogotá, Latorre found her passion for insects in a stream ecology class before heading to Mexico for a master’s degree in ecology. Pursuing her dream of a Ph.D. has taken a long time due to barriers women in science face in developing countries, she says. She likely will return to Colombia for a job in academia—with a mission. Her work at Andrews, as well as in Colombia’s Andes mountains, drives her desire to see decision-makers worldwide conserve more wild places for long-term research.

An image of Christopher Cousins searching for Cascade torrent salamanders.

Before the fires, Chris Cousins looks for salamanders in Andrews.

Crossing for survival

Like Latorre, Cousins, 38, is pursuing a Ph.D. in wildlife and conservation science. He’s a first-generation student; a dual citizen of Mexico and the United States; and the coauthor of Nuestra Casa, Our Home, a bilingual children’s science book featuring salamanders and frogs.

He’s especially fascinated by the Cascade torrent salamander, endemic to the Pacific Northwest and under consideration for federal listing as an endangered species. Inhabiting icy headwaters at elevations around 3,000 feet, the big-eyed amphibian is sensitive to forest streams warming and drying up. That’s a concern as mountain snowpack dwindles in a hotter climate, leading to a decrease in late-summer flows from snowmelt.

After catching the salamanders, Cousins clips the tips of their tails—which grow back—for genetic samples to help track where individual breeding adults go. Do they wriggle along streams or trek through forests to new waters?

Andrews “offers a remarkable opportunity for questions,” he says. “We are finding strong evidence that the salamanders are crossing ridges and going into [other] watersheds.” Small, isolated populations are at greater risk of extinction, but connecting viable salamander habitat across landscapes and property boundaries enables gene flow, preventing the loss of genetic diversity.

Cousins’ next step will be to identify the precise locations of salamander crossings—information that will help land managers protect these places from new road construction and logging. His work builds on decades of hourly stream-flow recordings in Andrews, which has hosted experimental research since the forest’s founding in 1948. “There’s nowhere else that we have such detailed, fine-scale data,” he says.

Before wading back into streams to gather more samples after the Lookout Fire, Cousins needed time to process his feelings. “The H.J. has some of the coolest old growth, and we have so very little left, so when we lose old growth, it’s really hard,” he says. Despite setbacks, he remains undeterred: “One reason why I love science and want to do it forever is because you’ll never get bored.”

An image of a Cascade torrent salamander.

A key subject of Cousins’ research, the Cascade torrent salamander (above) is endemic to the Cascade Range’s western slopes. Ferrari’s research subjects include the hermit warbler (below).

Highs and lows

Ferrari, a 30-year-old Virginia native working on a Ph.D. in forest ecosystems and society, ascends towering trees to conduct skyscraping bird research. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, she climbed 14 Douglas firs in Andrews multiple times: seven old-growth trees ranging from 200 to 300 feet in height and seven second-growth trees topping out around 100 feet.

She’s studying how different species of songbirds—including hermit warblers and chestnut-backed chickadees—divvy up vertical territories, comparing multilayered ancient forests to younger canopies planted 60 to 80 years ago. At Andrews, secure in her safety harness, she rigged the trees with climbing ropes and installed bird audio recorders and temperature sensors at regular intervals up the trunks. Recent inquiries at Andrews have indicated that older complex forests offer cool pockets for songbirds to escape heat in a warming climate. Ferrari takes that research to the next level by studying birds within their own realm—high up—rather than from the ground.

An image of a hermit warbler perched on a branch.

Half of her study trees burned in 2023, including four old-growth firs. With thick, fire-resilient bark, some will recover, like the Douglas fir that, at 306 feet, bests the Statue of Liberty by a foot. But Ferrari’s favorite, nicknamed Wolfy, will not. At least 500 years old and 6 to 7 feet in diameter, the tree succumbed after surviving past wildfires.

“Wolfy was a friend and a teacher. I learned about climbing, myself and the system around me,” Ferrari says. “I trusted my life to this tree.” While mourning, she’s also celebrating Wolfy’s future as a standing dead tree that will host cavity nesters and slowly decay, returning carbon and other nutrients to the soil. “The beauty is this tree will never be gone, and life continues to exist,” she says.

After the Lookout Fire, Ferrari climbed seven unburned trees for a new chapter of her dissertation. Pausing every 50 feet, she played bird songs and recorded responses to map the birds’ territories. She planned to climb again once Andrews reopened following the 2024 closure—this time to retrieve her equipment from burned but living trees. Her favorite moments occur high in the canopy, she says, where she finds serenity in an uncertain world.

Even after the Ore Fire evacuation cut their field seasons short for the second year in a row, Latorre, Cousins and Ferrari all remain optimistic they’ll stay on schedule for their degrees. Representing a generation of scientists who will work amid climate-change extremes, they see the fires as part of their education.

“A piece of me will be here forever,” Ferrari says. “The Andrews has touched so many people, and so many have loved this place.”

Read more about Marina Richie.