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[Rylee] Welcome to the ASCCing the Experts podcast, where every day is a good day to ask a question. This podcast is provided by the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (or ASCC) Network, which is a collaborative effort to establish a series of experimental silvicultural trials across different forest ecosystems in the United States and Canada. In each episode, we bring you up-to-date findings from natural resource professionals who are conducting applied research related to climate adaptation and ecosystem management. We hope that platforming these individuals and their work will lead to a more widespread understanding of the importance of climate adaptive management and improved ecological outcomes in North American ecosystems. Thank you for tuning in! 

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[Rylee] Good morning, all, this is your host Rylee McMillan and today I’m joined by Dr. Linda Nagel. Linda currently serves as the department head of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota, and as the leader of the ASCC Network. In the past Linda has held many impressive roles including Dean of the S.J. and Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University, professor at Michigan Technological University, Director of Operations at the Cloquet Forestry Center and the Hubachek Wilderness Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and Department Head of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship at Colorado State University. 

[Rylee] In these roles, Linda has brought about meaningful change by creating resources such as the National Advanced Silviculture Program for the United States Forest Service, and by providing leadership and direction in the fields of teaching, diversity and inclusion, and forest management. Linda’s commitment to the field of natural resources is truly inspiring, and I’m very excited to learn and share more about her work on the podcast today. Thank you, Linda, for joining me! 

[Linda] Thank you, Rylee, for that kind introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today.

[Rylee] Likewise. So, the purpose of our interview today is to learn more about your work in the fields of forestry and natural resource management, and especially about your involvement with the ASCC Network. To start off, I’d love to hear more about what initially drew you to natural resources and whether or not your interests have shifted over time. 

[Linda]. I love this question, as it forces us to think about our lived experiences and what we value in life. And for me, it really starts where I grew up on a small farm in rural South Dakota, essentially living my childhood outdoors. I was always curious about nature, and that led me to study biology at South Dakota State University.

[Linda] When I was going to school there, I took a class called Forest Ecology and Management, and it involved a camping trip to the Black Hills, where I also learned about a profession called forestry, where you could learn about trees, how they grow and how to manage them. So, that was a really important and a really cool discovery for me, that you could get a paying job to spend time in the woods and learning about trees. And my curiosity for that and for nature really paired well with another passion that I developed, which was teaching and learning. And that led me down a career path in education, research and outreach. 

[Linda] So, then I went on to grad school at Washington State University, and for my master’s degree, I studied tree seedling response to ultraviolet radiation. And at the time, the depletion of the ozone layer was an environmental crisis, and so we developed this experiment where we studied things like impacts of that radiation on tree leaf physiology. And so, I learned all kinds of cool things like spectroradiometers and electron microscopes, and the study of ecophysiology of trees. And then I took some of those skills and applied ecophysiology principles to stands of trees during my PhD. And that was really my gateway into silviculture, which is my disciplinary home. 

[Linda] So, what I really love about silviculture is that it is a super interconnected and interdisciplinary field, and it’s both a study and a practice that really requires integrated systems thinking, the integration of ecology along with social components and cultural components. And it… and you have to ask these questions like, why are we managing this forest and how do we do that in the best way possible?

[Linda] So back to your original question, my perspective has definitely evolved a lot over time as my own understanding about how, like, individual trees function all the way to stands and forests and the whole system of forestry as a discipline. So, it’s been a very interesting and long journey.

[Rylee] Thanks for sharing that, Linda. I know a lot of your work now specifically focuses on climate adaptive silviculture. Can you define silviculture for our listeners and expand on how the field relates to climate adaptation? 

[Linda] Yes, I’d be happy to! So, one thing you’ll learn is silviculturists really love to talk about terminology. So according to scholars, silviculture is a really old discipline, even older than the discipline of ecology. And I think that’s a really, kind of, interesting aspect of the field of study. So, we often cite the Society of American Foresters Dictionary of Forestry when we talk about definitions of silviculture. And that definition reads “the art and science of controlling the establishment, growth, composition, health and quality of forests and woodlands to meet the diverse needs and values of landowners and society on a sustainable basis.” 

[Linda] And that definition works pretty well, though, the contemporary environment that we are working in requires something of an expanded definition. So, I’m going to draw a bit from our recent paper on this [Nagel et al., 2025]. So, silviculture as a discipline really developed historically out of wood scarcity in the 19th century. So, early forest scientists, were applying things like plant and soil science principles for developing strategies for sustaining a harvestable wood production and yield from both natural and planted forests.

[Linda] Aspects of that historical definition of silviculture work pretty well here. Things like controlling the establishment, the growth, the composition, the health, the quality of forests for diverse landowner needs. However, there’s also been a significant shift in the discipline of silviculture over the past several decades, with a de-emphasize of that sort of top-down control of forests toward a greater integration of the ecological, social and cultural values and dynamics.

[Linda] So, we’ve kind of recast silviculture as a field that supports and stewards forests and woodland ecosystems and their ability to adapt. So that’s where that adaptation piece really comes in. So, this evolution of forestry also demonstrates that silviculture really has this inherent ability to be highly adaptable to changing conditions, including those diverse social, ecological and cultural drivers of change with climate adaptive silviculture as a really good example.

[Rylee] Wonderful, thank you Linda, for clarifying that term and its development over time. I really appreciate your passion about this topic and it’s clear that you’re very well researched, which I think our listeners will appreciate as well. In connection to your response, could you please share a bit about why you think that researching climate adaptation strategies for forests is so critical in our modern day?

[Linda] Well, this brings to mind that old adage that change is the only constant. So, things aren’t static. We can’t just manage for what’s in front of us. For the present day, we always need to be thinking about and preparing for the future based on what we know now. So based on best available science and information. So, we’re already seeing changes to our forest ecosystems due to a changing climate and lots and lots of stressors that are being placed on forests. And we all want to mitigate some of those impacts. 

[Linda] So that brings us back to silviculture, which has always been a values driven and future focused discipline. So, this is incredibly important in educational contexts as well. So, forestry requires lots and lots of tools in the toolbox. It requires technical skills, knowledge, credentials, experience. It requires critical thinking. It requires interdisciplinary knowledge. Forestry requires creativity and open mindedness. It also requires good communication and durable skills like collaboration skills and conflict resolution skills. But forestry is also a long-term discipline, and that requires humility. So, we work across really long time scales into the future, and we have to acknowledge that we will make mistakes along the way. But what’s really important is what do we do with what we learn from those mistakes and those successes.

[Linda] So, one of those elements is how do we navigate a world that is so filled with uncertainty? Because we cannot possibly know all the answers today to the problems or the challenges that we’ll have into the future. This is where, from an educational standpoint, and this connects really well back to this project and this work, that we need to instill a culture of lifelong learning, where we can continue learning over time by embracing a growth mindset.

[Linda] And that also helps ease the discomfort of not knowing how to handle uncertainty, or just acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers for what we’re going to need in the future. So, it’s critical for how we’re thinking about training the next generation of natural resource stewards and leaders, as well as how we serve the needs of practitioners today.

[Rylee] Awesome. Thanks, Linda. I really appreciate how you shared openly about the humility needed as a forester, as a practitioner, and as a researcher. I think it’s super important when we consider future change, and all the uncertainty that exists, that we recognize that we will make mistakes, and that that’s a part of the learning process. 

[Rylee] So, moving on to our next topic; in 2009, you co-founded the ASCC Network, which is the largest experimental silviculture program focused on climate adaptation in North America. Can you provide a brief overview of the Network’s history and why you felt it was needed in the early 2000s, and continues to be needed today? 

[Linda] Sure, I’d be happy to tell you the kind of… the history and the arc of how this all came to be. So, I was a faculty member at Michigan Tech when all of this work began. I’d been leading a couple of training programs with the USDA Forest Service, called the National Advanced Silviculture Program [NASP], specifically an Ecological Systems module and the Great Lakes Silviculture module.

[Linda] And at the time, I had started working really closely with Chris Swanston, who, at that time, was the director of the Northern Institute of Applied Carbon Science, the NIACS group, before it became Climate Science [Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science]. And Maria Janowiak was also working… with that group. And she’s now the director of NIACS. 

[Linda] So, around 2007 or 2008, we began teaching a module as part of that NASP training program on climate change. And this was actually a significant change to the curriculum at that time. It was not embedded in the original curriculum. So, we had to work with the leadership of the Forest Service to bring that climate change and adaptation piece into the program. 

[Linda] So, we started that by presenting climate science, you know, how do we assess ecosystem vulnerability to climate change? We brought in some climate adaptation theory including things like what is resistance? What is resilience, what would it mean to transition an ecosystem into a future condition, and how we would design treatments to do that. So, we had been teaching this for a couple of years, and Maria [Janowiak] and I went to the National Silviculture Workshop in Boise, Idaho, in 2009, where we presented on what we were doing, and that really drummed up a lot of interest at that time. And that was followed up by some leadership within the Forest Service, reaching out to me and asking if we’d be willing to design an experiment that would show on the ground examples of climate adaptation in action. So, they recognized what we were doing in the NASP program was really important. But the next step was we really needed some examples on the ground of what that looked like. How would we apply those principles to different forest types? 

[Linda] And so, when I got that, that literal phone call where I was asked, would you be interested in building an experiment that would be, you know, statistically rigorous, that we could learn from. I said, yeah, for sure. And then immediately, Chris [Swanston] and Maria [Janowiak] and I started strategizing. Well, how would we actually approach this? Because we were starting from ground zero. So, that is kind of the beginning of how we developed that collaborative effort that we now call the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Network.

[Rylee] Thanks, Linda. So, in your description of the Network’s initial conception, you mention a few folks, i.e. Maria Janowiak and Chris Swanston, who were involved in getting the project off the ground. I know that the Network is now composed of practitioners, professionals, scientists, that are all united by the ASCC mission. Can you share about how more folks became involved in the Network over time, and what that growth looked like? 

[Linda] Yeah for sure. So, we started this project with a team of climate change and adaptation thought leaders. So that included myself, Chris Swanston, Maria Janowiak, and at the time we early on hired Matt Powers, who’s now faculty at Oregon State University. So, we were kind of a core team to begin with. And we expanded that core team to include Brian Palik and Jim Guldin, who were researchers with the US Forest Service in the area of silviculture.

[Linda] We also invited Linda Joyce and Connie Millar, who were climate adaptation experts with the US Forest Service. And so, as a team, we did a lot of conference calls, and this was kind of before Zoom was really a big thing. So, we spent about two years with this group of thought leaders building the experimental framework. And that included defining resistance, resilience, transition; are those the right terms that we want to use to build this experimental framework? 

[Linda] We talked about various elements of the experimental design and some of the parameters that we thought would be necessary in order to build something that could be compared across different sites. And then we conceptually tested that framework out with different forest types by having people work through a process. And then we ultimately utilized the Climate Change Response Framework, the CCRF, that NIACS has built and led as the foundation for building this project. 

[Linda] So our current leadership team, in addition to me, still includes Maria Janowiak and Chris Swanston, as well as Courtney Peterson, who is a program manager for ASCC, Maria Vicini, who’s a coordinator for ASCC, Pete Clark, who’s a research scientist, you, Rylee, who’s been really helpful with communications. And it’s just been an honor working with all these different people over the years and watching this project really evolve. 

[Linda] So, we aimed for 3 to 5 sites. We now have 14 sites, so we in many ways really overachieved from our original goals. Each site is then led by a team of scientists and managers. And, so, at this point we have over 200 partners and collaborators. And that’s been just really gratifying to see this whole program come together, that is leading science, creating demonstrations, conducting outreach with constituencies and partners. And it’s truly been adaptive over time.

[Rylee] Wow, that’s really impressive. I didn’t realize that the initial goal was 3 to 5, so having 14 sites is really amazing. Building off of that, the purpose of each of these sites is to execute the ASCC protocol and provide crucial information for how to manage forests amidst changing conditions. Can you tell me more about the ASCC Network’s experimental design and how each of the sites play a role in that design to achieve that purpose? 

[Linda] Yeah, that’s a great question. So, through the first couple of years that we were working on the project, we built this experimental framework and design that we decided really needed to be adhered to and sort of maintained with every one of our sites. So, that also led to us realizing the importance of building inclusive and functional teams at each of the sites. And we worked really hard to empower them to then lead their various aspects of each site. 

[Linda] So, we also learned very early on that it takes a lot of time and planning and energy to really build a successful workshop and to ensure that, in this case, we had all the right ingredients, all the essential ingredients for success in delivering and implementing a project of this scope at each of the locations where we built this.

[Linda] So, to ensure that we’ve got this study design with some common elements that we’ve held constant across all the study sites. And that has allowed us to start comparing and asking questions like, do the ecosystems respond as we predicted? Are desired future conditions achieved? Do the treatments achieve the management goals? And are there trends across the different adaptation options that are working better than others? 

[Linda] At each of the sites, we have four replications of our treatment framework, which is resistance, resilience, transition, and a no-action control. And each experimental unit size is 20 to 25 acres or ten hectares in size. So, replicated four times by, you know, ten hectares at about a 200 hectare study at each of the sites and locations. And then these are monitored over the short and long term. So, we conduct pretreatment data collection and then we convene a workshop. The treatments are designed and implemented. And then we do post-treatment monitoring at some regular intervals. 

[Linda] So, the local context has been really, really critical in applying the framework. We have different partners at each site. Some of our sites are on federal lands, National Forest System lands, some are on state lands, some are private. We have an urban site here in the Twin Cities, and where possible, we’re engaging with Indigenous communities as it’s been appropriate at the development phase of each of the sites. And that’s become a really major focus for us as we move forward. 

[Linda] So, the different forest types and the different context really drives how we apply that framework at the local scale. And that’s been a really interesting and important element of the project as well. 

[Linda] So, we have a workshop process that is really built around co-production. So, this is an essential ingredient to this whole Network, and this whole effort. So, basically we work with a couple key folks who are leading the given site. We work with them to establish who should be at a co-production workshop. And that size is usually about 15 to 20 people. And it spans a range of expertise and interest or people who are most important to that particular context. 

[Linda] The workshop is typically three days. We had to pivot when we were in Covid times. We actually did a few of the workshops virtually, which was a unique set of challenges, because one of the things that we really like to do is go out to the field and visit a site where we’re going to be implementing the different treatments. And so that was not something we could do during that particular time. 

[Linda] But, the workshop is really… oftentimes the first day is a broader audience. And we, you know, we talked a little bit about the training that we did for the National Advanced Silviculture Program. It’s kind of an expanded version of that where we talk about climate science, ecosystem vulnerabilities for that particular location. And then we guide folks through how to think about a spectrum of adaptation options and then developing treatments for a given forest type. 

[Linda] Then, with that smaller group, we work through a collaborative process where we’re engaging everyone and building consensus around the treatments that we are designing across that spectrum and then ultimately implementing. And that requires some compromise and some discussion amongst the group. And it’s been very gratifying to see groups really work together to develop treatments that make sense for their particular location. 

[Linda] And one thing that has also become really an interesting observation, working with all these different groups, is that this is a wide range of silvicultural approaches to managing a given forest, and often there’s one end of the spectrum – resistance, resilience or transition – that makes people really uncomfortable. And that’s often the transition treatment because it requires so much departure from what might be on the landscape right now. But it’s a really excellent opportunity to think about risks and the risks of not doing anything, or the risks of not moving an ecosystem into a more potentially adaptive state, given what we understand about future climate. So it’s been a fascinating process to guide groups through that exercise of developing those treatments and then seeing it implemented on the ground.

[Rylee] Thank you. Linda. That was a really detailed description. I appreciate how the Network’s comprehensive design centers on collaboration and on testing out alternative future outcomes that are informed by local conditions and knowledge. It seems like a lot of our solutions are really broad, and the Network does a great job at being super site specific and working with folks who are at the sites and on the ground.

[Rylee] So, in your response, you talked a little bit about how the applied research being done by the ASCC Network can be used to inform management at the experimental sites. Can you tell me about some of the avenues used by the Network to get those same findings to those working externally from ASCC?  

[Linda] Yeah. Great question… We have traditional information dissemination like through peer review publications, and that’s really ramping up across the Network. We have things like outreach like this podcast, and there’s lots of other examples of people talking about this work in various capacities. We’ve given lots and lots of presentations at a wide variety of conferences, from practitioner events to scientific conferences, and an increasing number of international engagements where folks from other countries are really interested in the work that we’ve done. And that’s been very gratifying to be able to share outside of North America what this approach is all about. 

[Linda] We’re also working on a number of translational publications and products that are starting to come out, such as those focused on adaptation planting. And concept papers around topics like forest assisted migration. 

[Linda] And another major output that’s been really valuable is we intentionally designed these sites in places where they could serve as on the ground demonstrations, which means we can bring people out to look at the treatments on the ground themselves. And then you can compare, side by side, what different approaches to this climate adaptive management looks like, and how these different treatments are performing with respect to management goals, desired future conditions and all those values that are locally important to that particular context. 

[Linda] So just as an example, we’ve estimated that well over 500 students going through the National Advanced Silviculture Program have had their feet on the ground at different ASCC sites, looking at different treatments and taking in and using that basically as an outdoor learning laboratory for that particular program. Then we have lots and lots of university classes that have visited. Lots of practitioner field trips have been conducted at many of the sites and just the general public as well. 

[Linda] So one of the things that also has been very cool to see is that those conversations in the field are so rich, where people are asking, you know, the field trip leaders, the scientists and the managers who have been leading these projects, questions and the conversation that unfolds is really, really valuable. So, the field-based component of this, I think, is just an amazing aspect of the project.

[Rylee] Wow, those are some really incredible numbers. And I absolutely agree that as a student, the field-based classes I’ve been able to take, and the opportunities that I’ve had to interact with professionals and researchers, like you, are truly invaluable. 

[Rylee] You mentioned that the ASCC Network has also released several publications and online resources that make their findings more accessible. I believe that these are amazing resource for professionals and enthusiasts and I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the Network’s most recent publication titled: Ten Years of Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change: An Applied, Co-Produced Experimental Framework. Congratulations on having this paper published in the renowned journal Bioscience! Could you give our listeners a brief overview of that paper and its significance to you and the greater community?

[Linda] Thank you Rylee. I’m really proud of our new Bioscience paper. It’s a culmination of the work that we’ve undertaken for, well, probably about 15 years now. And we did publish a concept paper in 2017 [Nagel et al., 2017]. And this paper really expands on that original set of ideas that we published in the Journal of Forestry then. So, our new paper encapsulates many of the key lessons that we’ve learned over time from this collaborative work.

[Linda] First, we frame the role of silviculture in climate change adaptation. So, you got a little bit of a glimpse of that earlier in our conversation, and we talk a little bit about why silviculture is adaptive by its nature, and how the framework that we built is an excellent example of translational ecology, and a true example of co-production and adaptation in action that leverages place based knowledge. So, that was a great realization for us over the last few years that we’ve really been doing that type of work sort of organically through this project. 

[Linda] The paper also then presents an overview of the ASCC experimental framework, including all the definitions that we just talked about. It’s got some cool new graphics that we designed for this paper. And then we talk about some emergent trends of what we’re learning so far. And that includes things like… well, drought and wildfire are very common across many of the sites as concerns for the future. There’s a growing emphasis on building structural and compositional complexity across that spectrum of adaptation treatments. So, that’s been kind of an interesting thing to observe over the years. And then forest assisted migration is an increasingly common tool that’s being considered by managers. And that’s something we’ve been able to observe over the time that we started this project. So that’s been an interesting element too. 

[Linda] And then impacts of the experimental framework we already talked about. You know, we built far more sites than we originally planned to from the very beginning. We’ve learned a lot of lessons about the process of true co-production, what works and ways we can improve that. And then the outreach piece that’s really taking off with demonstrations and field trips and a lot of the presentations and things that we’re doing. And we’ve also really built a very powerful community of practice across the Network, but then beyond the Network, and we’re trying really hard to make what we learn from all of this work highly accessible to as many people as possible. 

[Linda] One insight on the paper that wouldn’t be obvious in reading the paper, but for me was really, really gratifying. As we wrote this together, the coauthor team over the last one to two years had many, many meetings over Zoom to talk through aspects of the paper. I mean, in a way, we weren’t generating data for this paper, but it was really collecting a lot of thinking that we’ve been doing for a long time and trying to package it in a cohesive, succinct story that also demonstrated all the things that we’ve learned. And so, we spent many hours debating things like, well, how are we exactly defining desired future conditions and the terms, benchmarks and reference conditions? And we did a lot of diving into the literature, and we didn’t really find a lot around how people define things like desired future conditions. So, it became apparent that there was a, you know, an increasingly important role for this paper. 

[Linda] We had to ask ourselves some tough questions. Have we really been implementing these terms and using this terminology consistently through these many years that we’ve been working on this project, and how do we define things like climate adaptive silviculture, and is it different from silviculture without climate adaptive in front of it? So really, really rich discussions amongst this collaborator group. 

[Linda] We also talked about things like where does the concept of restoration fit into this context of climate adaptive management? Because that’s an important term that’s used in a lot of different ways. And so, we forced ourselves to grapple with how that connects in with this particular work. So, that was a great outcome for me and a great experience to work with, you know, amazing collaborators and have these very fun, interesting, lively discussions as we, as we wrote this paper. And it made for a much better paper in the end.

[Rylee] Yeah, that absolutely sounds like a rigorous undertaking, and I’m so thankful that you, and everyone else involved, were up to the task since the knowledge you produced collectively through the paper is going to be so useful to so many people. I really hope that some of our listeners will have the chance to check out the paper, which I’ll link in the show notes for this episode. 

[Rylee] To end, I just want to connect our discussion back to an earlier topic, climate adaptive silviculture. Could you address how publications like the recent Bioscience paper help to inform climate adaptive ecosystem management and silviculture on the ground?

[Linda] Yes. We have long term questions as part of this work in forestry and in general, when we conduct forestry research, it’s, you know, very different than, say, agricultural research, where we might have crops that we grow for a given year. Forestry is just a really long-term discipline, and our questions tend to be really long-term. So, with the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Network, we’ve also asked, well, what can we learn in the short term? How can we make the most meaning out of what we’ve built now? And how can we design this so that we can keep learning from it for many, many years into the future? 

[Linda] So, we don’t have all the answers right now, but we do have a lot of tools to work with. I mentioned the Climate Change Response Framework earlier, and that tool, along with the best available science, is a great starting point and really was the foundation for building this Network.

[Linda] Another important takeaway from all this work is around the importance of building connections and collaborations and networks of people like this Network has been… has been built, whether formal or informal. So, this project has brought together many people; scientists, practitioners, decision makers, members of the public, students, volunteers. And all these people share a common purpose and a common desire to make a positive difference in what we do, and for our planet. And I have just been blown away by the questions that we get and the interest that this work has generated, because people want to do something positive. 

[Linda] So, we need something to be hopeful about. And this project has provided that for a lot of people, including myself. I have been so inspired and found this project to be so rewarding to work on over the years, and to see how we could co-create solutions for the future and the opportunity that this one project has created for me to engage with so many other people has just been amazing, and it’s been instrumental in giving me hope through all aspects of my life.

[Rylee] Thanks for sharing that, Linda. That was really profound. The Network’s mission and achievements also give me a lot of hope. I’m really excited to see what happens next with the Network and look forward to hearing more from you in the future. 

[Rylee] I think that’s a great place for us to wrap up this conversation. Before we close out, I just want to ask you, is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

[Linda] Thank you Rylee. This has been a great opportunity to talk with you today. As you know, I love sharing about silviculture and this work, as I do believe it’s really important for the future of our planet and for sustainability. I’m excited to see how this project evolves, especially the outreach components, and to see how we can continue making the most meaning from this Network that we’ve built together. Thank you.

[Rylee] Great, thank you again Linda for taking the time to join me today for this enlightening discussion. I really appreciate your insight and am inspired by your example as a leader of change in the field of natural resources. 

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[Rylee] For our listeners, please check out the ASCC Network website linked in our description for more information about the organization and what we do. And remember to look for our next episode that will be released in two weeks. This episode will feature a discussion about why we do weed management with Colorado State University, research scientist, Dr. Jake Courkamp. Thank you for listening in. And thank you again, Linda, for participating in this discussion with me. Have a great week everyone! 

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