GoKawiilThe Cutfoot Experimental Forest in Minnesota is near a research facility that could be closed as part of the US Forest Service’s reorganization.Credit: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty
“Overwhelmed.” “Saddened.” “Crushed.” “Demoralized.” That’s how some former and current scientists at the US Forest Service feel as the agency weighs closing dozens of its research sites. The list includes facilities that support research at woodlands designated as experimental forests, some of which have supported active, longitudinal research for more than a century.
These locations are “irreplaceable. You can’t say, ‘Okay, I lost that one. I’m going to go start another 70-year study,’” says a recently retired forest-service scientist. (They requested anonymity to protect ongoing research collaborations with agency staff.)
As it stands, the forest service’s Research and Development (R&D) branch is the world’s largest forestry-research organization, with roughly 1,000 employees at 77 sites. Its scientific track record includes identifying the exact species of fungus that causes white-nose syndrome in bats and creating a woodland-fire model used in multiple countries.
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If a large number of sites are closed, many research projects would be more difficult, if not impossible, according to nearly two dozen former forest-service scientists and six of their collaborators who spoke to Nature. These researchers also say that uncertainty over job reassignments could drive scientists to leave the agency, and that the proposal is the latest blow to an organization that, over the past 18 months, has already lost hundreds of employees in the R&D branch and cut back its scientific work.
Forest-service officials justify the proposal by pointing to the agency’s vast stock of neglected infrastructure and the low occupancy of some sites, and say that its science won’t be affected. “The intent of the reorganization is to maintain the research,” US Forest Service chief Tom Schultz told Congress in April.
But others worry that closures will have far-reaching consequences.
The reorganization plan “is very short-sighted,” says Vicki Christiansen, who was forest-service chief during President Donald Trump’s first term, which ended in 2021. “If administrations need to scale back, they need to scale back. But do it in a thoughtful way that sustains some of the core pieces of what generations before us have collected.”
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